By Bart Barry-
SAN ANTONIO – We’ve got Covid back under control here, partially, and if we hold the line while vaccinations take their effect we may avert further historic tragedy. If we do this it will be thanks to local government and local organizations, a very different breed of leader and businessman than what the word Texan rightfully conjures; this city’s mayor and this county’s judge have resisted what shortsighted greed informed most every state-level decision come down these last 12 months.
History will not forgive, even if voters – beleaguered: frightened, unhealthy, desperate for remedy – someday do. A generation of men raised to genuflect always before the market god went unconvinced there were questions in the universe they couldn’t answer with their childlike supply-and-demand intuition. Before the first Covid casualties were buried at virtual funerals these jackasses got up to bray about we’ve got to get this economy going again!
Whatever economy returns won’t look like the old one. A lesson from the Renaissance, courtesy of the Bubonic Plague, is when a half-million citizens die before they’re supposed to die, survivors lose faith in the previous system, and that lost faith expresses itself in unimagined ways. I’ll leave it to the kids to figure out which churches they’ll swap-out for artists this time round.
Crypto over fiat, doge over dollars, looks like a safe bet so far. Or maybe it’s just coincidence the U.S. dollar, the one constant in every human’s life since World War II, loses 99-percent of its value against a different virtual currency every month. Since the presidential election dogecoin is up 2,544-percent against the dollar. That is astounding when written like that and astounding in an entirely different way if you write it like a loss in the dollar’s value. Whence does this value come? Maybe it has long existed in the immense amounts of uncompensated labor humans have done often for themselves and more often for others.
If this account reads like a Covid survivor’s, I suppose it is written by one. Wednesday night I had the second of two Moderna SARS-COV-2 vaccination shots, 28 days after my first. It strikes me there are far more speculative accounts of what the vaccine is or isn’t than eyewitness accounts, so let’s remedy that slightly here.
The second vaccination shot ushered in none of the euphoria of the first, unfortunately, but it did bring side effects. Round 7 PM Wednesday I made my way in the same partially defunct mall I had in January and found quite a few more people in the lobby than there’d been in January. Yet the line for vaccinations was empty. I strode to the registration table, presented my CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card and got directed down the same hallway. There was no one in front of me this time, and within two minutes I was injected in my left shoulder and sent to the same 10-minute-observation room.
Ten minutes later I was back in the lobby and noticing how many more persons were gathered than 15 minutes earlier. Many more and much older. It struck me on the way out the door these are people who’ve been unable to attain appointments. It’s one more blossoming tragedy vulnerable citizens now congregate for hours indoors in the hopes of pulling a leftover vaccine at last-call. Which is not to recommend anyone forego his second shot; the last thing the world needs in 2022 is millions of half-vaccinated Americans globetrotting to spread their iterated, thrice-as-virulent strains.
Thursday morning began symptom-free, with a slight pain where the needle went. At 1 PM, though, symptoms hit. The best way to describe the symptoms are the fatigued and achy feeling you get when you know you are about to get sick and there’s nothing to be done about it – maybe an hour after Airborne or echinacea or immune syrup could have intervened. This crummy feeling lasted till 9 PM. The next morning only a bit of left-shoulder soreness remained. For those scoring at home, then, an eight-hour window of symptoms occurred in the 18th hour after the second vaccination shot happened.
Sometime by the end of this week I’ll be fully vaccinated. This brings all the ecstasy of being stranded alone on an island; you have the freedom to frolic naked in the waves and bathe in coconut milk, but without anyone to share this great good fortune with, really, what is it for? A coworker posed this question Friday. My answer is that it’s for not-being a vector, for not-infecting others, for disabling one node, of billions, on COVID-19’s network.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
