Looking forward to reading everyone’s blogs and comments. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Let’s Get Blogging!!!
Pandemic Reflections
CFDE University Course, Fall 2022 (GRAD 700) convened by Dr. Jodie Guest
Looking forward to reading everyone’s blogs and comments. Please let me know if you have any questions.
We live in a polarized national environment. It’s easy in that environment to become reflexively defensive and forget the importance of looking backwards at ourselves. Recognizing where we fell short and acting to correct it. Holding ourselves accountable. When you deal in politics, you probably owe it to your constituents. And when you deal in healthcare, you certainly owe it to your patients.
It’s a pretty thing to say but hard to do; we’re proud creatures by nature. But I think just over 2/3 of the US has declined to get a single booster, much less all three. I think it’s time to explore, seriously explore, where we may have misstepped.
“The vaccines have become politicized.” Sure, but that’s vague and probably the understatement of the year. The country seems at each other’s throats over them. Why? I think the clue here would be the severity of the controversy compared to flu shots or polio shots. Yes, these vaccines have a ‘gene therapy’ component, and that’s a little different. But to explain this fundamentally different public response, we have to consider the fundamentally different government response.
Freedom of personal movement has been taken from people sick with smallpox in extreme situations like war before, but it’s never been taken away from everyone, all at once, for months and, in some places, years. The stay-at-home orders weren’t medical recommendations, the ones doctors give to patients, they were orders, the ones cops give to civilians.
The sitting President called this “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Even among those of us vaccinated, most of us have a loved one who is unvaccinated; hearing the leader of the free world calling them a disease is disturbing. “That isn’t what he meant.” Perhaps not, but it’s certainly how many people heard it. I know many of us reading will have our self-defense mechanisms triggered by it, but that’s an important thing, and it wasn’t said off-the-cuff. We need to grapple with it. How can we expect people to react to that? Who’s going to trust you if they hear you call them a pandemic? Was that punching up?
These heavy-handed tacts may get the choir fired up, the staunch supporters, but it sets a lot of people in the cheap seats, the casual supporters, looking sideways at each other. And it alienates people who have mixed feelings—the people who can be won or lost. It’s just not good enough to wave away missteps like these without actually modifying our behavior. Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fear that’s what we’re preparing to do.
To make this even longer, I’m throwing in a story I was told as a kid. I like when principles we teach children come back to us as adults.
One day, the North Wind and the Sun began to quarrel over which of them was greater. The North Wind boasted of his great strength to the Sun, but the Sun argued that there was power in gentleness. “We shall have a contest,” said the Sun. Far below, a man traveled a winding road, wearing a coat. “As a test of strength,” said the Sun, “Let us see which of us can take the coat off of that man.”
“It will be quite simple for me to take his coat from him, certainly easier than for you,” bragged the Wind. The Wind blew so hard, the birds clung to the trees. The world was filled with whipping dust and leaves. But the harder the wind blew down the road, the tighter the shivering man clung to his coat, bent against the howling wind.
Then, the Sun came out from behind a cloud. The sun warmed the air and the frosty ground. The man on the road straightened and unbuttoned his coat. The Sun grew slowly brighter and brighter. Soon the man felt warm, so he took off his coat and sat down in a shaded spot.
Ok Alex, I am just now seeing this b/c it was in the comments instead of in an actual post. Can you help me understand specifically what you are saying here? I can’t tell if you are saying folks should or shouldn’t get vaccinated or if you are saying that the government should not be involved in an individuals healthcare. What if your approach to your healthcare impacts my health, or the health of high risk immunocompromised folks? How do we manage the community impact?