Countdown to anti-vaccine backlash

 

Dr. Nancy Glick, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital, prepares for its first round of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccinations. (photo by Ashlee Rezin Garcia for the Sun-Times)  

   
     Welcome to the Chicago Sun-Times Latin Lockdown Workshop. Please direct your attention to the chalkboard, where I’ve written: “Post hoc ergo propter hoc.”
     Let’s say it together and remember to trill your Rs. Ancient Romans called “R” the “littera canina,” or dog letter, for the little growl in it.
     “Post hoc, errrgo prrropter hoc.”
     Good, good.
     In English: “After this, therefore because of this.” It’s what we pointy-heads call a “logical fallacy,” the faulty circuit that connects you to a wrong conclusion when two events occur close together.
     I mention it now because the joy of getting millions of vaccines to millions of American arms will be quickly followed by a backlash of imaginary bad results. That isn’t a crystal ball prediction; it’s a take-it-to-the-bank certainty. With the exception of a few extremely rare allergic reactions, the most common vaccine side effect will be passing soreness. But some getting the vaccine will blame it for later being hit by a bus. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
     “With the vaccine, you’ve got to be careful when you hear side effects,” said Dr. Michael Ruchim, a gastroenterologist at Northwestern Medicine well-versed in pharmaceutical trials. “The question arises, ‘Are they cause and effect? Or something random the person getting the vaccine was going to get anyway?’” On average, 730 Americans per 100,000 die every year. About two a day. So if you give everyone in a random group of 100,000 a teaspoon of water, expect 14 to die over the next week. From heart attacks. Cancer. Hit by buses.
     Now give them a vaccine. A week later, another 14 deaths. But in public perception, the vaccine is now deadly. Two people died the very next day! Don’t laugh, this is how the anti-vaxxer movement started. “Timmy got a polio shot, and now he’s autistic!”
     Especially since vaccines will be given to seniors first, who are not a random slice of the population but a group already more likely to get sick.

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Stud

     

     So we're remodeling the downstairs TV room. A new light maple floor over the hideous old white linoleum one. New cool blue paint. It seemed criminal to return the dented, chipped, rusty beige metal baseboard heater covers. So into the garbage with them, and in with fancy baseboard covers that look great. Cover Luxe from Plastx. I was hesitant to order an element of the house made of plastic. But we have a small bathroom with even more foul baseboard covers—you don't want to know—and I ordered a small Plastx cover for that, as an experiment, and it looks awesome. I grew up with plastic being a shoddy, flimsy material. But it seems they've gotten better at it. The plastic is sturdy, looks better than the metal, and won't corrode like metal does. 
     I might have hired somebody to put the covers in, but during the small one in the bathroom experiment, I seemed to manage, even though it involved the Cirque du Soleil level calisthenic trick of folding myself into a corner behind the toilet while drilling, I seemed to manage. 

    The fancy baseboard covers require brackets to be put into the studs. I usually shrug off the whole "put-it-into-a-stud" aspect of home improvement—the framed posters and paintings never fall off the wall. But these fancy baseboard covers really need to sit flush. Tight. My wife urged me to and, reader, she was right. This demanded a stud finder. Off to Ace, where they had one that cost $30, a Zircon, the substance that Frank Zappa encrusts a pair of heavy duty tweezers with in his ode to dental floss, "Montana." I held it in my hand and thought. "This can't work." It looks like the data recorder from some 1970s Chinese line of knock-off Star Trek toys. 

     On Amazon, checking its dozens of cautionary reviews, frantically waving off potential buyers—"Doesn't work" and "Garbage" and "More accurate randomly guessing" and "You couldn't give me a free one"—I got the impression it was an unwise purchase. To work, it seems a stud finder must cost $75, at least.

      If you live 60 years without a particular device, the temptation is to keep going through life without it. I strolled through YouTube, the home improvement amateur's friend. First looking at videos evaluating the vast universe of stud finders when I noticed this one, "5 genius ways to find a stud ... without a stud finder." Intrigued, I gave it a look, and they said basically, to get a general idea where the stud should be, since the electrical socket box will be screwed against one, then wave a strong magnet up and down and you'll find a nail in the stud (for readers even more clueless about construction than I am, "stud" refers, not to a certain kind of man's wildly-inaccurate self image in the 1990s, but to the vertical 2x4 lumber within a wall). 
     I looked at the metal bulletin board in our kitchen, and there, holding coupons, was a red magnetic dart from a long-ago dart set—I guess the idea was that these would not be as injurious if the boys started throwing them at each other. It needed a pretty strong magnet to affix itself to a target when thrown from a distant, and the tail made a handy way to hold it.   

    Damn. It worked. I passed the dart up and down the wall by the electrical socket, then at 16 inch intervals, and found the studs to put the anchors in so my brand new baseboard covers would be flush to the wall and not pull away. I loved having the little red dart just stuck to the wall, boldly outing the deeply closeted nail head, bird-dogging the stud, telling me where to screw the baseboard bracket. It was an arduous morning of lying on our new floor, concentrating not to somehow drag the spinning drill bit across it, putting in those brackets, cutting the moldings to length. But I put an entire wall's worth in. Only two more walls to go.
     Plus—and this is the surprising part—I felt happiness at denying the Jeff Bezos Pricy Ineffective Electronic Stud Finder Cabal its pound of flesh, and clawed back $30 or $75 from a the project, which could turn out to be as much as 1/2 a percent of the total cost.

Texas Notes: Things That Go Bump In The Night

    Into the realm of darkness with Austin bureau chief Caren Jeskey. 

     Early one morning I heard something running around my tiny house as I slept. It knocked a few small things down on the cedar chest that I use as my bedside table. I was slightly startled but more than that I was tired, so I told myself not to worry and I fell right back asleep. I forgot about it until the next day when I saw a bright green anole lizard clinging to the screen of an open window in the bathroom. I wasted no time and moved quickly. I caught him gently under a jar and brought him outside where he belongs.
     A few days later in the wee hours before dawn, I heard something drop onto my bed with a thud. Little feet scampered past my ears at a furious pace. Like the last time, I forgot about it until the next day when I felt somebody watching me. Another lizard—this one staring at me while perched frozen on a kalanchoe plant. After some hilarious cartoon-like running around on both of our parts, I finally caught him under a Tupperware container. He tried desperately to contort his way out. Despite his acrobatics I was able to slide a piece of cardboard over the lid and escort him out to the yard. His poor little tail was caught between the cardboard and the plastic and I was worried I may have hurt him. Later, a friend told me that their tails can regenerate. What a relief.
     Sleep has been a bit of an adventure for me lately—much more so than I’d prefer. I’m usually a very good sleeper. I’m serious about habits that lend to a solid night of rest. I teach classes that promote sleep, including one called Beditation. Lately I get into bed between 8 and 10pm, and am out like a light for 8 or 9 hours, sometimes more.
     That’s why the past couple of weeks have been difficult. One night while deep in REM sleep I woke up with a dream fresh in my mind. I noticed that the bottom of my bed was shifting around. It seemed that someone was sitting there and my legs rolled towards the indentation. I was half-asleep and didn’t even bother taking my big silk eye mask off. In and out of awareness, I thought “did the opossum that lives under the house get inside?” I realized that was probably not possible, and I was too tired to really care. The bed kept moving.
     I thought, “Is it June? Is she visiting me?” June is the elderly lady who lived in this house until she died last year, I’m assuming in this bed. I don’t really believe in ghosts but in my half-dream state I decided to let her know that she is welcome here. I thought “If it’s you June, that’s OK. You can stay.” I drifted off. Then the bed started moving again, and I imagined a scary demonic ghost of June hovering over me, unhappy that I was in her bed. I felt terrified for a moment, but then reminded myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. I finally fell asleep again.
     I was woken up every half hour or so for the rest of the night. The bed kept shifting. I actually thought “maybe some lizards have hatched in the mattress.”
     The next night it happened again, and then again on the the third night. I finally thought to Google “side effects of SSRIs.” I had started taking an SSRI, aka an antidepressant, to boost my mood a month or two earlier. Sure enough, tactile hallucinations, as well as tremors and night terrors are all possible side-effects of this class of medication.
     I immediately consulted with my doctor and stopped taking it. As soon as I did, the next night was slightly better. I was awoken by the magical moving mattress, but remembered that it was a side effect, nothing more. I noticed that my legs seemed to be vibrating from the inside, another known side effect. Over the next few days I was woken up before it was time. Armed with knowledge, and also from the effects of weaning off of the medication, I was able to simply notice what was happening, and put myself back to sleep.
     It’s been two weeks since I’ve been off the SSRI. Luckily my mood is fine, though my energy seems lower. The unwelcome nighttime activity has almost ceased.
     On top of all of this, I’ve also had a few nightmares that seem to be COVID related phenomena many are experiencing. Collectively, people are reporting an increase of vivid dreams and nightmares. This indicates increased central image intensity, the central image considered the emotional focus of a dream, according to Yale Medicine’s website.
     This Fall I’ve been telling myself “this too shall pass,” and it will be 2021 soon. Now I am starting to see that we are a long way from how things used to be. I am preparing myself for the inevitable truth that it will be years before things seem normal, and even then some things will never be the same again.

Goodbye Tribe, hello Spiders.

      My grandfather Irwin and I never fished, or played poker. We did not golf, build models or play cards. He did teach me how to play chess, and gave me a dollar if I won. Or if I lost.
     And once we went to the enormous cavern of Cleveland Municipal Stadium, sometimes around 1966 or 1967. I can't tell you who we played or whether our team won. All that was preserved in family lore is that we went, and that I ate two hotdogs. It was not a compliment.
     In 1973, I had perhaps my peak sports experience. A double header against the Boston Red Sox, a far better team. I saw Carl Yastrzemski at the plate in his trademark bat high stance, and afterward got his autograph as he headed for his car through a swarm of us kids. I still have the program.
     There was more: I collected baseball cards, which I also still have. I was a card-carrying member of the Buddy Bell Fan Club. I read Gaylord Perry's memoir "Me and the Spitter"—the Tribe had a habit of getting good players on their way down. I particularly liked former Oriole Boog Powell, if I recall, because he was chunky, like me, and named "Boog." I listened to sports radio so much I can still imitate callers to the Pete Franklin Show. "Pete...Pete, I'd like to tell you my Cleveland Indians dream team!!!!"
     If there is a trace of mockery in that, well, that's why I'm not a true sports fan. I have the same trouble with politics, evoking that classic line of Eugene McCarthy's combining the two: "Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, 
and dumb enough to think it's important."
     I understood both games. I just can never quite master the think-it's-important part. Though there certainly were moments when both seem important. 
     The team was a Rapid Transit line ride away. Esther Otterson and I went to see the Yankees on the 4th of July. Maybe 1980. Again, I can't say whether the Indians won or lost.  But it sure was important to be there.
     There's more, but that's enough. What I'm trying to say is that I'm a Cleveland Indians fan, sort of, or was, during various periods of time, and would still be if I were in the habit of putting on airs, which I'm not. Enough of a fan that when the Indians won the pennant in 1995, I cried, and would have attended the World Series, had my wife not been giving birth during the game I had a ticket for. I decided to stay in Chicago for that. It was the right choice.
     Two years later I did go, to the '97 series, and saw us lose during a hideous, four-hour, 42-degree debacle. My buddy and I slipped out before the end of the game to hit the strip clubs in the nearby Flats.

     A certain flexibility has always been necessary to follow the Indians—or whatever they're going to be called next. The current name never offended me, but then I am not Native-American. I loved Chief Wahoo, found him appealing, not degrading—he represented out team, remember—but I also understand that fish don't consider water wet. When people more woke than myself tried to make me understand why Chief Wahoo was offensive, and said to imagine the team were suddenly called the Cleveland Jews, my eyes lit up. I would love that. A Hassid done in the Chief Wahoo style, with earlocks and that grin. I'd put that pennant on my wall.
     Then again, as tough a time as Jews did, historically, we sailed through history untouched compared to what the Native-Americans suffered and suffer. Jews kept our traditions and language, did well enough in whatever society we were in, and even have our own little scrap of a country punching above its weight. Let's just say if newsreel images existed of what the Native
-Americans endured, we'd view our history very differently, and none of these racist symbols would have survived to 2020 to be fussed over.
     In other words, it's hard to perceive the realm you're raised in, and when Native-Americans say that the team name, and its mascot, are offensive, and racist, I am not inclined to argue with them. Nor do I think changing the name is a bad idea. Things change. One of my favorite bits of can't-make-it-up baseball trivia is that the White Stockings were founded before the Cubs but the Cubs are older than the White Sox. How can that be? Because at one point the White Stockings became the Cubs, and then the new White Sox were created. You can't make this up. The Cubs also used to be the Colts. Teams change names. When you see the white-knuckled terror with which some white folk cling to the tiniest shift in cultural tradition—say "Happy Holidays" to a multi-ethnic classroom and you're waging war on Christmas—a thinking person lets go of this kind of thing even more easily. I'm a third-generation Cleveland Indians fan, but if it's time for the name and the mascot to go, then be off with them. I approve. 
     Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Times change, and we change with them.
     Now if only the Italian-Americans could do the same. A word to the wise: Enrico Fermi Drive.   

     This is Cleveland after all, the city that lost its football team. The Cleveland Browns—the most anodyne name ever—moved away in 1995, becoming the Baltimore Ravens. Four years later the NFL waved a wand and created a new Cleveland Browns out of nothing, which is pretty much what the team has been worth over the past 20 years. So it's not like the city can start crying about legacies and traditions and unbroken sports bloodlines.
     The way baseball has been going, I expect they'll find some completely lame name. The Cleveland Rock 'n Rollers. Bleh. I'd reach back into history and return to "Spiders," which was Cleveland's National League name in the 19th century. I visited the University of Richmond, on a college tour with the younger boy, and their team, the Spiders, offers such great graphic possibilities I almost bought a t-shirt just because they looked so cool. Cleveland needs all the cool it can get. Go Spiders.

And that's how it's done.

 

     The years flit by, irretrievable. But by jotting a quick gloss of the day's events, you can manage to preserve a teacup full of facts for future reference.
      Unlike you, if I want to get an idea what I did on, oh, Oct. 24, 1992, I have a way to find out. "Travel to New Orleans—took cab to Prytania House—enormous, decayed mansion with soaring ceilings of perhaps 20 feet. Walked around Garden District, then took St. Charles streetcar to French Quarter. . . Lunch on the balcony at the Royal Cafe. Seems like we had just been transformed there; so sudden."

     I think I meant "transported." But heck, I was 32. A pup, relatively. 
     Getting back to keeping journals. Of course the books must be jotted in, every day, ideally, which takes a kind of discipline. Honestly, in years gone by, I'd sometimes miss months at a time. But I've been better in the past decade or two. More alert at the end of the day, if you catch my drift. 

     The books must not only be written in, more or less regularly, but they also must be purchased once a year. That's a non-negotiable requirement. No book, no record. For the first 15 years, from 1985 to 2000, that involved a letter or, if running late, a phone call to Waterstone's in London. Then when Waterstone's stopped making literary diaries—no future in it, I suppose—I started buying a simple red Brownstone journal at Atlas Stationers on Lake Street. I would carefully take my old journal out of my briefcase, compare it with the new to make sure they were the same size—they make a range—and then conduct the transaction.
     Even with the pandemic, I planned to pick one up in person. I phoned in mid-November, and asked them to put one aside. If you wait until too close to New Year's, you risk Atlas running out. I did that one year, and they had to scramble to find one and get it to me. They did, because they're that kind of place. But it was a near thing.
      So I had one set aside. Then suddenly it was the second half of December, and I realized: I might not get downtown to pick it up. Not in this very strange Plague Year. Definitely would not, unless I made a special trip. Which seems silly, what with the postal service right here, despite everything. Maybe even risky too. So I phoned Atlas, and asked if they would mail it. Of course. I'll have to have the pleasure of chatting with owners Therese and Don Schmidt another time. They're doing well; online business is booming.
     When I got the box Wednesday, I cut it open, and found the new diary, just like the old diary. And something extra.  A post card, with a simple thick-lined painting of their store, under the 'L' tracks, with its distinctive cast iron pillars. Quite beautiful really.

     A lagniappe, as the Cajuns say. A little present that seals the deal. 
     See, that's why no matter how efficient Amazon becomes, or how big Office Depot grows, there will always be room for an Atlas Stationers. Because someone had to secure the painting from artist Kathy Los-Rathburn and someone had to print the postcards and someone had to scrawl, "Hi—So long 2020, Hello 2021—Bye" with a smiley face on the back, then tuck it in the box. Jeff Bezos will never cook up an algorithm to create and insert the unasked-for post card with a friendly little note at the end. Not without charging extra, that is. I don't know if everybody who places an order gets one, or just super special minor local media personalities, though I suspect it is the former.
     Anyway, it perked up a dark wintery COVID era day for me, and I thought it just might perk up your day too.
   

When the doctor becomes the patient

Dr. Roy Werner (photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia) 

     Paul Kalanithi’s 2016 posthumous memoir “When Breath Becomes Air” was a big best-seller for obvious reasons. Here was a brilliant neurosurgeon facing terminal lung cancer, grappling with death at a young age.
     It also served up one of those prince-and-the-pauper role reversals that capture the public’s imagination. The bold, resourceful doctor becomes the fearful, helpless patient, perched on an examining table in a thin cotton gown, awaiting his fate. The proud made humble.
     When I was writing Monday’s column on how hospitals are faring at this point in the COVID-19 epidemic, I came upon a digression too lengthy to fit in but too interesting to leave out.
     I was talking with Dr. Roy Werner, director of the department of emergency medicine at Roseland Community Hospital, about whether medical personnel are more at risk in the intensive care unit, masked and gowned and leaning over a COVID-19 patient on a ventilator, or sitting in their living room at home with their children traipsing in and out.
     “My family has been fantastically supportive,” said Werner, who lives in Huntley. “I have a wife who really gets it. We have two teenaged kids, and I’ve been able to explain it to them. I had COVID a few weeks ago, stayed in one room of the house, the kids did their own things.”
     I asked how the illness affected him.

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Flashback 1992: The Literacy Effort that Could; Persistence Pays Off in Pilsen as Kraft Grant Boosts Program

     Once upon a time, I was the charities, foundations and private social services reporter at the paper. That was my title. As such, corporations would always come to me with the news that they were giving X amount of money to Y organization. 
     Instead of the reaction they obviously expected—"You ARE?! How amazingly GENEROUS of you! Let me get that into the paper RIGHT AWAY!!!"—I would ask a question that stopped them dead in their tracks and usually killed their interest in having me write anything.
     "Could you tell me how you picked this particular recipient? Because That might make an interesting story."
     The answer was inevitably "No, we couldn't." They didn't have to say why. Because that would involve effort, on their part, going to the various levels of whatever nightmare corporate bureaucracy they had going on, thus revealing something of themselves. Plus the story would shift from what they wanted to see—"WIDGETCO GIVES BUNDLE TO DESERVING CHARITY 'This is just the kind of caring, generous folks we are at Widgetco," said Widgetco president and CEO Clark Manningly...—to something else. Something unknown and therefore scary.
     Then Kraft Foods bit, and I wrote the following. What made me smile, in a rueful way, is that after it ran, then companies started asking me to write a story on how THEY decided to give to a certain charity, and I had to turn them doing say, "Sorry, I just did that...."

     With happy, reading children sprawled photogenically at her feet, Joyce Grant, of Kraft General Foods, stood in the Rudy Lozano library in Pilsen on Thursday and presented an oversized check for $25,000 to representatives of a literacy project for Mexican Americans.
     It was the sort of do-goodery that corporations cherish. A truly worthy cause, supported by the fruits of our great American economic system.
     But exactly how did these two very different entities meet? How did giant, multinational Kraft General Foods, with $28 billion a year in revenues, find itself handing over a bit of cherished corporate profits to a shoestring literacy program based out of a crowded office on Harrison Street?
     Thousands of programs of every size, description and merit set out on the journey; far fewer have the skill, worthiness and luck to finish successfully.
      The literacy program, called Project FLAME, was among the lucky.
FLAME stands for Family Literacy: Aprendiendo, Mejorando, Educando (learning, improving, educating). It was created in 1989 by Tim Shanahan and Flora Rodriguez-Brown at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
     As often happens, FLAME was a program created—in part—by a funding availability. In 1989 the Department of Education announced it wanted to give out grant money for bilingual literacy programs.
     Rodriguez-Brown, a specialist in second-language education, read the department's announcement in the Federal Register and joined forces with Shanahan, whose focus is reading education and literacy. They hammered out the FLAME proposal and sent it to the federal government.
     FLAME would increase the availability of reading materials in Mexican American homes, encourage parents to be better role models regarding literacy, and include Spanish literacy as a value along with English literacy.
     Impressed, the Education Department gave a grant of $ 135,000, over three years, to FLAME.
     The program flourished. By fall, 1991, FLAME was at three locations in Pilsen. The next step, as Rodriguez-Brown and Shanahan saw it, was to begin training participating parents so they could run the program themselves.
     But the federal government would only give money if FLAME was relocated.
While the idea of backing the program in a different area was attractive, the UIC professors did not want to leave the parents in Pilsen high and dry.
     So, while accepting the government money to start up FLAME in a West Side Chicago neighborhood (and managing to redirect $25,000 to keep the Pilsen FLAME going), they began searching for additional funding.
     They turned to Pat Wager, UIC's liaison with the philanthropic community. Wager scanned the Taft Directory—listings of corporate philanthropies and the type of efforts each supports. Corporations, striving to have the biggest impact with limited budgets, tend to direct giving to specific, narrow fields.
     Kraft General Foods has three target areas: hunger, the arts and, as Wager carefully noted, education, particularly involving parent-child interaction.
     Wager called Grant, the manager of community affairs at Kraft, who said FLAME sounded interesting. Grant doesn't pretend her company gives away millions of dollars out of a warm, fuzzy, anthropomorphic big-heartedness.
      "Our business is here," she said. "You need educated, capable employees. For that, the schools have to be in good shape, plus community infrastructure, transportation, capital needs. All this is working to help customers."
     Janet Kuhl Marcuson, a professional grant writer in Wager's office, spent nine months researching and revising 20 drafts of the FLAME proposal.
     In June, a 14-page proposal was sent to Kraft, one of 346 they received in "a pretty average month," according to Grant.
     The proposal passed before a temporary employee who opens the mail that pours into Kraft's foundation. She rejected 176 requests, responding to each with one of 10 form letters saying: No, Kraft does not donate products. No, Kraft does not give money to individuals. No, Kraft does not underwrite benefits.
     The remaining June proposals, including FLAME's, moved upward to community affairs administrator Linda Burda, who gave them closer scrutiny.
     "The first determinant is: Does it meet our focus area?" Grant said. "Does it meet the budget? Does it conflict with other things we fund? Is it redundant to other things we fund? Is it a good organization?"
     Then there is the influence of what certain Chicago ward heelers used to call "Vitamin P" - power. Grant doesn't pretend that the influence of powerful Kraft executive sponsors won't affect a proposal.
     "It isn't the driving force, but it helps," said Grant, pointing to a request to sponsor a cooking station at a benefit gala—not something the company would normally do.
     By July, the FLAME proposal was on Grant's desk, and she set up a visit.
     "It's a very important part of the job, not only to learn who they are, but they can meet somebody from Kraft General Foods," Grant said.
     The site visit went smoothly. The Mexican American women, eager for the program to continue, directly lobbied Grant in their limited English.
     "One woman, very shy, very hesitant, walked up to me and said: 'Do this,' " Grant remembers. "I was very impressed with the program."
     Things moved quickly after that. Because FLAME was seeking $ 114,609 over three years (Thursday's check was a first installment), Grant had to meet with her board of directors.
     They gave approval, and, after the congratulatory phone calls, the traditional check presentation ceremony was set up. About 20 women and 40 or so children sat at tables at the Lozano library. A festive Mexican buffet, prepared by the women, was spread out on a long table. Before handing over the large ceremonial check, Grant discreetly slipped the real, rose-colored Kraft General Foods check to Rodriguez-Brown, who put it in her purse.
     "What this check means is there will be English classes this year," said Shanahan, and everyone clapped.
               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 9, 1992.