I’m planning to write about vaccine skepticism and, based on the polling, it’s clear that not all skepticisms are the same. Some view vaccines as intrusive and vaccine mandates as a violation of their rights. Others see vaccines as creating other illnesses. And other still have qualms about Big Pharma. While I don’t agree and have trouble seeing from where some of this skepticism derives, I think it is important to have this discussion.

I’m interested in all concerns, and want to know what it would take to ameliorate them. I’m particularly interested in African Americans, who have expressed the greatest concerns, because of the history of abuse at the hands of the medical establishment.

If you’re interested in helping — either by passing along your thoughts, having a conversation, or connecting me to skeptics or academics who look at this, send me an email, or comment below.

Please, do not use this post as an excuse for debate in the comment section. I will remove those. I’m truly interested in what people have to say, and I don’t want them to fear criticism or attack. There are plenty of other forums for people to go back and forth.

Thanks in advance.

The vaccines are here! The vaccines are here! If my use of the exclamation point seems a bit over the top, I apologize. I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but I am echoing the tone offered by much of the media and the political classes now that the Pfizer vaccine has shipped and the first doses have been given to frontline workers. 

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for instance, described the vaccine as “the weapon that will end the war.” Dr. Chris Dale of Swedish Health Services in Seattle told the Associated Press that we are at “mile 24 of a marathon.”

“People are fatigued. But we also recognize that this end is in sight.”

I’m left wondering if we shouldn’t be tempering that optimism with a little more humility that “it’s a long tunnel, but we can see the light.” Just because you make it to mile 24, does not mean you will be able to drag yourself across the finish line.

Maybe I’m just a natural skeptic, but I’m concerned that we have taken to describing these vaccines as magic bullets. I have no reason to doubt their efficacy. I believe the science, and I plan on being vaccinated when it’s my turn. But we should not allow ourselves to fall into the trap of magical thinking, thinking that if we believe in something it will lead to the outcome we desire. 

The available science gives us cause for optimism, but also should give us pause. The logistics of getting viruses to millions of people will be complicated and difficult. The anti-vaccine community is larger and, when combined with the Trump cohort, creates a mass of people who can undermine our efforts. We should not allow ourselves to be seduced into hubris.

Vaccine trials are structured so that they can mimic real-world conditions, but they still are just trials. As Carl Zimmer explained in The New York Times in November, researchers during vaccine trials “vaccinate some people and give a placebo to others. They then wait for participants to get sick and look at how many of the illnesses came from each group.” They do this while controlling for variables that can include age, gender, health, and other issues, and they are designed to measure narrow outcomes. They give us an idea of how effective a vaccine is likely to be and what potential side effects the vaccine are likely to cause, but they cannot account for all of the conditions that exist outside of the trials. The important word here is likely, because it reminds us that the conclusions offered by researchers are their best estimates.

That’s why scientists differentiate between efficacy (in this case 95 percent), which is what trials give us, and effectiveness. Efficacy and effectiveness are measure the same way, using different data. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the federal agency tasked with studying the spread of the coronavirus, says that efficacy refers to laboratory conditions or clinical trials — or “when a study is carried out under ideal conditions.” Effectiveness refers to less-than-ideal, real-world conditions. “Exactly how the vaccines perform out in the real world will depend on a lot of factors we just don’t have answers to yet,” Zimmer wrote in his Times piece, “such as whether vaccinated people can get asymptomatic infections and how many people will get vaccinated.”

So, the 95 percent efficacy rate — which the CDC describes as the reduction in the number of cases for those who are vaccinated compared to the baseline expectation for those who are not vaccinated — may end up being significantly smaller, though this distinction  and the uncertainty it implies should not dissuade us from getting vaccinated.

But it should cause us to rein in the hyperbole, because the kind of language used in this report on ABC News (“life-saving science,” “something more than hope,” “a solution”), while understandable given the difficulties of the last year, could create unrealistic expectations. And that, in turn, could empower anti-vaxxers. Treating the vaccines as an automatic fix, when it is inevitable that there will be some hiccups, will allow the folks who distrust vaccines or assume they are some kind of crazy plot to seize upon isolated problems as they occur and use those problems to denounce the entire vaccine effort.

The other danger of treating the vaccines as magic bullets is that people might assume the “solution” — ABC’s word — is at hand and the entire crisis is over or is nearing its end. This, in turn, could lead people who have grown exhausted and angry to flout the guidelines and rules we have used to prevent this catastrophic pandemic from being even worse than it has proven to be.

Our approach going forward, therefore, should be to engender hope while being realistic, and to make clear both the benefits and shortcomings of vaccination. As with the use of masks, vaccines offer protections to individuals but are most effective when they are broadly applied. As Zimmer explained, vaccines may protect the individual, but they are more effective at “slow(ing) the spread of the virus” and “driv(ing) down new infection rates.” This will “protect society as a whole.”

Scientists call this broad form of effectiveness a vaccine’s impact. The smallpox vaccine had the greatest impact of all, driving the virus into oblivion in the 1970s. But even a vaccine with extremely high efficacy in clinical trials will have a small impact if only a few people end up getting it.

“Vaccines don’t save lives,” said A. David Paltiel, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health. “Vaccination programs save lives.”

Getting the vaccine to large swathes of the public is not going to be easy, especially with a significant number of people — up to a third of Americans, by some estimates — seeing vaccines as an assault on their freedoms or as being responsible for other illnesses. Again, the science says otherwise, but this anti-vax cohort will affected our ability to create herd immunity (an unfortunate label). We can’t ignore them or pander to them. We have to find ways to neutralize their impact, which can only happen through education and honest and open dialogue with the public. We should not oversell the vaccines, but we have to make clear that they are, along with masks and social distancing, an essential tool in getting us back to a version of normal with which we all can live.

First Lady-elect Jill Biden has earned the right to be called Dr. Biden. She received a doctor of education degree from University of Delaware in 2007, based on a dissertation that “focused on maximizing student retention in community colleges.” It is an important topic, given the difficulties students at community colleges face, difficulties I have seen first hand teaching at two New Jersey schools.

Joseph Epstein, an essayist, disagrees — and he took to The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page to make the case. His essay “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.” is one of those essays that comes off as a fresh take, when it really is nothing more than flashy nonsense. Epstein engages in gamesmanship, misdirection, bad faith, and bad logic, as he pens a screed that manages to be condescending, dismissive, and amazingly shallow given the platform.

What hit me when I read this was that I would not allow my students to engage in this kind of empty rhetoric. They are required to support their arguments with more than cherry-picked anecdotes and assumptions. So, I graded the essay based on one of the freshman composition rubrics used at one of my schools.

Here is the rubric and grade — a 72, which means the essay would pass, but not by much.

The rubric:

Here is my mark up of the text:

Am I being fair? I think so, but I’d invite readers to weigh in.

This is number 80 in my ongoing diary series, which runs on my Instagram page. My hope is to compile these, along with essays and poems that reflect our moment, into a book.

#FrontLines, a #pandemicdiary 80. Nine dead. Murdered. Pentobarbital. In six months. Five more planned by Jan. 20. A killing spree of massive proportions. After 17 years of silence. // Brandon Bernard. The latest victim. Bernard, 40, killed tonight in Terre Haute. Convicted of murdering Todd and Stacie Bagley in Texas. He was 19 at the time. Just a kid. Didn’t pull the trigger. But he was there. “I’m sorry,” he said before he died. // Todd’s mother thanked the president, the attorney general, “for bringing the family some closure,” said after the execution, “I can very much say: I forgive them.” // The Bagleys are dead. Brandon Bernard is dead. Christopher Vialva, who pulled the trigger, is dead.  // “A death sentence offers the illusion of closure and vindication,” says the Catholic Church. Appearance. Semblance. Imitation. Mirage. “No act, even an execution, can bring back a loved one or heal terrible wounds. The pain and loss of one death cannot be wiped away by another death.” // This is Donald Trump’s legacy. Adding dead to the dead. Almost 300,000 killed by his neglect. Fourteen more seem a pittance. But these killings are premeditated. Active. Thought through. // “We owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.” // But Batman does not kill the Joker. Because Batman would become the Joker. Justice would disintegrate before our eyes. // “When the state, in our names and with our taxes, ends a human life despite having non-lethal alternatives, it suggests that society can overcome violence with violence,” says the Catholic Church. Violence is normalized. Murder becomes a tool. “The use of the death penalty ought to be abandoned not only for what it does to those who are executed, but for what it does to all of society.” // 

“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” — Exodus 22:20

1/ They refuse food. Seven of them. Locked up in immigrant detention in Bergen County. This is what is being reported. Why there are protests outside the facility. They want ICE to “free them so they can await the outcome of their deportation cases at home amid the current coronavirus surge,” reports Matt Katz. // In America, we warehouse immigrants. Place them in cages. Treat them as criminals. Worse. //

*

2/ American History Lesson: The Chinese Exclusion Act. American History Lesson: 1921 Emergency Quota Act. American History Lesson: Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. // Italians. Jews. Poles. Slavs. Greeks. None need apply. // “Our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood,” said Albert Johnson, the Republican congressman who sponsored the bill. // Limited the undesirables from the east, especially the Jews. “The usual ghetto type,” said a government report, “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.” //

*

3/ Germany has made itself a world power, the naturalist William T. Hornaday wrote in 1918, “partly by welding together and maintaining her Germanic stock.” No mixing with Slavs. With Hungarians. With Jews. // Germans “are a unit, working like one vast machine.” America, he said, has “pursued an exactly opposite course.” Alien races flow into American cities. Into the heartland. “America has become the dumping-ground for the ashes and the cinders of all nations” (217). //

*

4/ The rhetoric repeats. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” This was Trump in 2015. This is Trump now. A nativist. He calls refugees from the south an infestation. A disease. An invasion. As if this were war. // On cable, the right’s commentariat amplifies the libel. Tucker Carlson says immigrants crowd out Americans. They despoil and pollute. Lou Dobbs says the immigrant influx is “just going to consign tens of thousands perhaps millions of Americans to their deaths.” Sean Hannity. Dennis Prager. Ben Shapiro. Rational restrictionists. Not opposed to immigrants, but to illegal immigration. Their arguments have the veneer of logic. But like the wood coating on a cheap dresser, they disintegrate. // Peel it back. Note the words. Culture. Homogeneity. Look at Japan, Prager says. Diversity leads to crime. Japan is successful because it’s homogeneous. Immigrants must assimilate, he says, as if they don’t. As if they refuse to. As if the young activists I’ve met, undocumented but in all ways American, are a fifth column waiting for orders. // This is not about assimilation. It’s about culture. About race. About “massive demographic changes,” says Laura Ingraham. // It’s about fear. About who the refugees and immigrants are. About where they come from. //

*

5/ Still we came. The Jews. My grandparents and great uncles and aunts. // “From their long and too often unhappy history the Jews had learned the value of migration,” writes Lucy Dawidowicz. // A history of wandering. Of flight. The “fundamental Jewish strategy for survival, the escape valve of Jewish history,” she says (3). // Exiles in Egypt. Refugees escaping the Pharoah’s wrath. Spread through diaspora to the winds. To Europe and Russia. To the Pale of Settlement. To America. On Passover, we declare, “Next year in Jerusalem.” //

*

6/ Still we came. Without papers. With few restrictions. A small tax. A check for lice or disease. And then onward. // “This is the America my great-grandfather, Samuel Freedman, came to in 1911, when he walked off the deck of an English ship onto Ellis Island,” writes Aaron Freedman. No visa. No passport. Nothing to document his travel. “In other words, my great-grandfather was an undocumented immigrant.” // No need for papers. The borders were open. “Simply stating the name of the ship on which he had arrived was all that was required for a foreigner to come to America with the intention of staying,” writes Freedman. // That was the America my grandfather entered. Henry Kaletsky. No more than 15 or so. Left Poland. Fifth of six to arrive. Father and sister would stay in Poland. The Jewish Quarter in Suwalki, the Pale of Settlement. Or that’s what we believe. // Henry entered through Ellis Island. With few papers, if any. Like his sister, brothers. Like hundreds of thousands of Europeans. Like Samuel Freedman. Lived in Queens. Would join the Army as the First World War ended. Became a citizen. Married. Had a child, my father. //

*

7/ Did he attend shabbat services at Schul Gasse? Buy his radishes and kosher meats on Market and Wesola? Almost a year in Brooklyn, with a daughter. My father’s aunt Rose. Irving tells my dad this. Irving, my dad’s younger cousin. Isaac, their grandfather, made one visit to America. To see his children. Six of seven settling here, mostly in Brooklyn. Like so many Jews from Eastern Europe, fleeing persecution. Russian and Polish pogroms. The segregation of the Pale. Isaac, my great-grandfather. refuses to stay in America. People don’t say hello. Returns to Suwalki, Poland, early-1930s. Home to shtetl streets where men sold birds and fish from stalls. Talked. Yelled. Sang. In Yiddish. Polish. This is all speculation. I watch a 1937 film clip. “Jewish quarter in Suwalki; Market in Filipow.” Soon the Nazis would erase these images. Poland would be partitioned. Suwalki bombed. Isaac died shortly before the Nazis invaded. Just weeks. His daughter Feiga, my dad’s aunt, and her family fled to Slonim. Eastern Poland. Now Belarus. They were rounded up. Massacred in the woods outside town. Dumped in a mass grave. Or so we believe. Feiga’s siblings were in the United States. Norman, Feiga’s son was sent here, too. // Irving says Isaac convinced Feiga to send their oldest son to American in ‘36. Isaac thought the rest would follow. //

*

8/ They didn’t. They died. Murder in the cause of purity. In the cause of power. By law. // “We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal,’” wrote Martin Luther King Jr. (134). // Feiga and her husband and her daughter. Irving’s maternal grandmother. His uncles, aunts. “They never made it to the camps,” he says. His Aunt Esther was 16. // Six million Jews killed by the Nazis across Europe. Jews scattered to the winds. Turned away. By Roosevelt. // “Most notoriously,” Daniel Gross wrote, the German ship St. Louis was turned away in June 1939. Nearly a thousand passengers, “almost all Jewish.” Denied entry in Miami. The Jews were sent back to Europe to die. //

*

9/ Separated at the Mexican border. Mother. Son. Two years apart as a penalty. A threat. A deterrent. As if they’ve committed the worst of crimes. Take away your kids. // In the Times, a story about reunification. Happiness tempered as bonds broken stay severed. As food grows scarce. As work barely materializes. // Leticia Peren fled north from Guatemala, the paper says, “rather than risk what might happen next.” The gangs. The violence. Her story is familiar. Carmela fled threats and domestic violence. Coming north, she told me, was her only option.. Still waits for a hearing, a friend tells me. // These families are refugees. Not criminals. Not vermin. Or insects or an infection. // Shut the borders. Build a wall. //

*

10/ I asked her why she left Guatemala. Why flee north? Why the United States? Carmela tells me her boyfriend raped her. He was protected by the gangs. The police did nothing. Her son was threatened. Bullied. Would be drafted into the gangs. // She would have stayed. Her family is there. Her father. But there is no safety. Trekking north. Relying on the coyotes. Crossing Mexico, through deserts and mountains. Crossing the Rio Grande. Into what has become hostile territory. There was no choice. // Carmela is in limbo. Carmela waits, but is lucky. She is in New Jersey. It is the waning hours of the Trump era. Refugees are huddled in Mexico. Hundreds. Thousands. Forced to wait there. A violation of American and international law. Refugees. Asylum seekers. Families separated at the Mexican border. // Mother. Son. Two years apart as a penalty. A threat. A deterrent. As if they’ve committed the worst of crimes. Take away your kids. // In the Times, a story about reunification. Happiness tempered as bonds broken stay severed. As food grows scarce. As work barely materializes. // Leticia Peren fled north from Guatemala, the paper says, “rather than risk what might happen next.” The gangs. The violence. Her story is familiar. Like Carmela’s. // Like my grandfathers’. Like so many across the decades.

*

__________

Works Cited

Atkinson, David. “Trump’s views on immigration aren’t as bad as those in the 1920s. They’re worse.” The Washington Post, 14 Janauary 18, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/14/trumps-views-on-immigration-arent-as-bad-as-those-in-the-1920s-theyre-worse/. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Dawidowicz, Lucy S. On Equal Terms: Jews in America 1881-1981, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1982.

Dickerson, Daitlin. “Three Years After Family Separation, Her Son Is Back. But Her Life Is Not.” The New York Times, 7 December 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/us/family-separation-complications.html?searchResultPosition=4. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Freedman, Aaron. “Open Borders Made America Great.” The New Republic, 9 August 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154717/open-borders-made-america-great. Date accessed 9 October 2020

Gross, Daniel. “The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies.” Smithsonian Magazine, 18 November 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-away-thousands-jewish-refugees-fearing-they-were-nazi-spies-180957324/. Date accessed 8 October 2020

Hornaday, William T. “Awake! America.” The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present, ed. David Brion Davis, Cornell University Press, 1979, pp. 216-218.

Ingraham, Laura, qtd. by Erin Durkin. “Laura Ingraham condemned after saying immigrants destroy ‘the America we love.’” The Guardian, 9 August 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/aug/09/laura-ingraham-fox-news-attacks-immigrants?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. Date accessed 8 October 2020

“Jewish quarter in Suwalki; Market in Filipow.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bland Family Collection, 1937, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn1005051. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Johnson, Albert, qtd by Tom Diegnan. “Progressives Have an Immigration Problem.” Commonweal, 7 December 2020, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/progressives-have-immigration-problem. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Kalet, Hank. “Border Song: A Story of Violence and Flight.” The Medium, 17 June 2019, https://link.medium.com/PVEq24r63bb. Date accessed 8 December 2020

Katz, Matt. Matt Katz (https://gothamist.com/news/ice-detainees-go-hunger-strike-second-time-month-bergen-county-jail)

King Jr., Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Radical King, 2105, Beacon Press, pp. 127-145.

Prager, Dennis. https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/dennis-prager-a-nation-of-immigrants-only-if-they-assimilate/

Trump, Donald, qtd. by Katie Reilly. “Here Are All the Times Donald Trump Insulted Mexico.” Time, 31 August 2016, https://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/. Date accessed 8 October 2020