February 5, 2021
A Gazette Editorial
A year ago the pandemic was still seemingly somebody else’s problem, and a strange and faraway one at that. Many of us were hearing phrases like ‘novel coronavirus‘ and ‘wet market‘ for the very first time and really not getting it. Upon learning that it was centered in a city in China that we’d also never heard of, some of us were like, ‘whatever,’ and made plans for Valentine’s just like we’d always done.
But before the month was over we’d heard from then President Trump on the subject, assuring us that America was in great shape. The next couple of months showed exactly the opposite, of course: record breaking EMS call volumes that hadn’t been seen since 9/11 but day after day for weeks on end, hospitals at or beyond capacity, mass graves being dug, and our city shut down like we’d never seen it. More than twenty thousand of our NYC family died in those dark days and we were shocked into compliance with the recommended cloth face coverings, hand hygiene, and social distancing. Meanwhile, the rest of the country looked at us like we were Wuhan, China, with a blend of pity, bafflement, and judgemental scorn.
Governor Cuomo rose to the occasion, coaching us to fight this awful thing and teaching us how to ‘bend the curve.’ Soon many of us were tuning in to his daily briefings, picking up epidemiology terms like the ‘R’ and ‘positivity’ and casually dropping them into worried conversations with neighbors. When the curve finally began to bend we were so shell shocked we couldn’t believe it. And then this wicked virus emerged elsewhere – the South, the West Coast, and the Midwest, and it became clear that the USA was not in great shape. It got ugly. It got stupid. Doctors and nurses appeared on the news exhorting people to take simple precautions to save lives, including their own. Others showed up at state capitals bristling with guns and insisting that taking precautions was a nefarious plot to…do something or other.
All in all, it was a horrible year. A medical miracle came through toward the end of it in the form of not one, but several, new vaccines that promised incredible levels of protection months or even years sooner than they’d been anticipated. This great news was tempered by an impulse to declare victory and go home, so to speak. It’s hard to overstate the need we all felt to put this nightmare behind us, and the vaccine news was all many of us needed to call it a wrap, even before anybody had actually been vaccinated.
The rollout was, like everything that had preceded it, chaotic, stupid, and inefficient. Every state was on its own once again, like they had been earlier in the year when they were bidding against each other for lifesaving PPE. The wheel was being invented in 50 different ways in 50 states and it didn’t take long for it to wind up in a ditch. Who was eligible? Who was in charge? How can a person get one of these vaccines? A big mess.
Our Congressman said that a lady from the Upper East Side came to the Armory to get a shot. In a limo! With her poodle! That wasn’t right because vaccine doses up here ought to be for this hard hit community. That’s just common sense. We have lots of cases, we have lots of people with comorbidities, lots of old people, essential workers, etc. It makes perfect sense.
So when the Gazette popped by the Armory this week we were kind of surprised by what we saw. No East Side ladies in limos with poodles out front, which was a good thing. But inside was another story. Young, helpful staffers smiled and directed all comers along to the next smiling staffer who inquired about appointment status, checked ID, gave a COVID-19 symptom checklist to fill out, took a temp, etc all very professionally and efficiently. There was no waiting at any of those points. This was all taking place on the Armory’s track level, which btw is HUGE. The vaccinating stations were all inside the oval, and there were lots and lots of them. A navigator directed each arrival to a station where a medical professional from CPMC would give the shot.
Here’s the thing: midweek, mid afternoon, there were a lot of available slots to get a jab. Somehow they’d underbooked, or people were no shows, or something else, but hundreds more people could have been vaccinated in just the brief time we spent there. That isn’t right. If we are to ever get this miserable thing behind us, we need to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible. If it drags out, the virus will just continue to mutate and spread and we’re liable to wind up right back where we started a year ago with a virus and no effective vaccine. And nobody wearing a face covering because after a couple of years of this they’re all like aw fuck it. We don’t want that scenario!
We were given a miracle: a vaccine with high efficacy way sooner than we dared to even hope for. Now we’re squandering it. The pandemic isn’t over just because there’s a vaccine. People have to take it for it to do any good. Here at the Gazette we’d like to see some of the outreach we saw for Census2020 and the Obamacare rollout. Where are the PSAs? Why aren’t there concerts and so forth (OK, virtual zoom concerts, whatever) to publicize? Why do folks have to make an appointment online when Obamacare style navigators used to deploy anywhere there were people and just sign them up? Where is an army of thousands of Census like Enumerators trained to go around and vaccinate home bound New Yorkers? Where the hell is FEMA? This is a 50 state disaster! Why do NY City and NY State (and all the other states & cities) have to trial and error this vital project?
There’s a new administration in D.C. and we hope they’ll quickly get their arms around this, this…disaster. We know it can be done because until about four years ago America was able to do great things like defeat fascism, put men on the Moon, build Interstates to drive on and an internet to surf on. More to the point, we’ve done mass vaccinations in a short time frame here before. Six million New Yorkers in under a month in 1947 and we can damn well do it again. We have to just do it.
