I have scheduled a measles booster for Monday (after confirming with Mom that I had only a single measles vaccine in 1972). It would be so stupid to die or even be sickened by a 20th Century disease. It would be even more stupid to find next month that I can't get vaccines because health insurance no longer has to—or is forbidden from—cover it. Or hospitals and their associated primary care clinics will have funding withheld if they offer them so they've stopped. Or that there simply are no vaccines available because their development manufacture has been suspended in the U.S. or decimated because there's no funding and everyone's been fired.
If you think those scenarios are impossible—or even unlikely—you lack necessary critical thinking skills or have completely buried your head in the sand.
I am so angry about this for several reasons. But I'm going to focus on just one of those reasons for a moment: the small-scale economic devastation of failing to control preventable illness through vaccines and public health investment.
In early March 2020, when the COVID pandemic was just a rumor, Spouse was already 100% remote at his job, and my job had no in-office requirement, except for meetings. Spouse and I had flown home from Tahoe over the weekend and I was in my office for a staff meeting that Monday the 2nd. At the staff meeting, I told my boss that on the advice of my father-in-law, I was going to stay at home as much as possible for a little while and would not be coming into the office at all if he was okay with that.
Friday that week, I was supposed to meet Mom & Sister at the Art Institute, but we canceled. I went to the LBTQ Giving Circle fundraiser at Beauty Bar that Friday anyway and stopped in at the Pop Up Karaoke show down the block. But I felt weird and went home early. That was the last time I went out for a long time.
I don't know if it was Pop Up's last show, but it had to be close to it because Illinois closed bars and restaurants for dining-in on the 15th and closed schools on March 17.
March 17th was the day Illinois recorded its first official death—although the first reported case in Chicago was in January. The first person-to-person transmission in the US was also in Chicago, on January 30. The first recorded death in the U.S. was on February 6 in San Jose, California (a death in Kirkland, Washington on February 29 was originally identified as the first U.S. COVID-related death).
At any rate, this was early March before people really began reacting with alarm. But it was not a big deal for me to just stay home, work from my personal laptop, cut back on the social activities for a while. I had no idea how disconnected and devastating the next year would be, but the disruption to my income, to my career, to the work-a-day lives in my household was nearly imperceptible, starting from that first casual comment to my boss that I was going to work exclusively from home for a while.
My job has never returned to in-office work, except for occasional meetings or voluntary in-office days.
So what does this have to do with the measles booster I'm getting on Monday? And with my anger at the right-wing lunatics running the government who have canceled planning for seasonal vaccines?
I have a lot of friends who are service industry and hospitality professionals. People who manage restaurants or bars; who handle events at hotels; who run or provide the entertainment at venues (the karaoke, the live lit, the cabaret); who tend bar; who emcee. When they can't go to work, they don't earn income. They lose clients. They lose their jobs. And when they can go back to work? Those clients are not still there.
When mass-scale illness prevents them from working, their present livelihoods, as well as their futures, disappear. Their careers suffer and they may never recover.
It's not just that the next pandemic, which is likely coming, will devastate them, ordinary flu season threatens them. If they can't vaccinate themselves, they are at risk. If their audiences and patrons can't vaccinate themselves. the patrons either stay home, reducing incomes, or they come anyway and make everyone sick. Either way, the people who work to keep the venues open and interesting are the ones who suffer both immediate income loss and diminished income potential. Bars, restaurants, clubs are still broken from the last time. What will the next time do to them?
And it's so unnecessary.
What is the intent of withholding ordinary effective seasonal vaccines from the general population? I have my opinions on that, but my opinions on intent are unimportant because where intent is unproven, impact is not. We have seen what uncontrolled, easily spread illness does to the livelihoods and lives of businesses and business people who can't just work from home. I have seen what it did to friends and colleagues.
More than merely unnecessary to expect them to bear those risks, it's immoral. It's cruel. But it's also profoundly stupid, It's policy designed by a person without any concept of how businesses work, much less how societies, economies and governments do.
I am so angry at this.
So I'm getting a measles booster because I can control that. Just like I got a pneumonia vaccine last month. And my Covid and flu shots every year. As long as they remain available, I'll get them. And when my insurance company stops paying for them, I can probably afford to keep up with them.
And I will because the only truth I know is: none of us is responsible only for ourself.
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Reading the Tesla tea leaves
4/2 '25
