covid

Fear Is Driving Both Sides In Vax Controversy

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An angry white man chastised me on Facebook for using asterisks in the word m*therf**ker claiming that Vietnamese Buddhist and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh advises us to “call things by their proper names.” He had commented on my recent blog post with a meme showing an unidentified Black man saying, “When are you dumb m*therf**kers gonna realize both parties work for the same fuckin people?”

While I agree wholeheartedly with the analysis, I have two goals in mind: the first is, don’t sink to name-calling (the first step in any genocide or civil war, because it dehumanizes “others”). The second is, don’t get kicked off Facebook. 

Just yesterday a slew of prominent anti-vax accounts were kicked off YouTube (which is Google-owned, not Facebook-owned) and political commentators routinely have their social media accounts shut down for sharing inconvenient truths or using “violent language.”

So, I may be skating on thin ice with this post examining some of the thinking on both sides of the COVID vaccine controversy. 

But, since I write when I’ve been reading news and opinion pieces until my head is about to explode, here goes.

Dr. Kimberly Manning is Black and, using hashtags like #blackwhysmatter, is offering a “No Judgment Zone” where people can talk about their vaccine hesistancy.

Fear is driving a lot of this hesitancy, especially as the CDC is a government agency that has given some really bad advice during this pandemic e.g. telling us last summer it was ok to take off masks in indoor public spaces if we were vaccinated. I suspect their motive for doing so was commerce not public health but, even if they were sincerely misguided, the advice was disastrous and led directly to this, the third and worst spike of COVID infections in the U.S.

And the good old U.S. government has not only lied to us many, many times, but has sponsored multiple genocidal practices like literally starving indigenous children in residential schools to see how few calories they could tolerate before succumbing. 

Source: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10153858717610184&set=a.105088390183

Also infecting Black men with a debilitating, fatal disease in the infamous Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. The study ran, incredibly, from 1932 to fucking 1972! The subjects of this gruesome experiment were not told the facts, just that they were getting “free health care” from the federal government.

And let’s not forget that the U.S. has been investing in biological weapons research for decades.

Here’s a young NBA player explaining his own vaccine hesitancy:

By now you probably think I’m anti-vax, but I assuredly am not. 

I’m fully vaccinated, everyone in my family that’s the right age is fully vaccinated, and just this week I facilitated my husband getting a booster shot. One of my children got COVID last month but is fully vaccinated and had a mild case with no serious repercussions thus far.

Which is really fucking lucky, because now I’m going to address the other side of the ethical question. You know, public health, and the fact that we’re all in this mess together.

When an individual speaks about why he, as an individual, isn’t going to take the vaccine, I respect his opinion but I think he’s wrong. Epidemics aren’t about you, they’re about the germ pool you’re part of AND, increasingly important, about the hospitals you’re sharing with others in your community.

I’m going to share one of the thousands of stories out there from grieving families who watched a loved one die, not of COVID, but of being unable to access health care in areas where hospital ICUs are full to overflowing.

Then I’m going to share one of the thousands of stories out there from doctors and nurses who care for acutely ill patients and have been doing so in an escalating emergency that has now lasted 20 months.

Here’s one from Alabama dated September 13, “Family: Man turned away from dozens of COVID-filled hospitals.” 

As hundreds of mostly unvaccinated COVID-19 patients filled Alabama intensive care units, hospital staff in north Alabama contacted 43 hospitals in three states to find a specialty cardiac ICU bed for Ray Martin DeMonia, his family wrote in his obituary.

The Cullman man was finally transferred to Meridian, Mississippi, about 170 miles (274 kilometers) away. That is where the 73-year-old antiques dealer died Sept. 1 because of the cardiac event he suffered. Now, his family is making a plea.

“In honor of Ray, please get vaccinated if you have not, in an effort to free up resources for non-COVID related emergencies,” his obituary read.

reported by Associated Press


And, here’s one from Iowa reported September 6 where an emergency room doctor with decades of experience shares his exhaustion and career perspective:
[Dr.] VanGundy said that he’d recently seen non-COVID-19 patients with meningitis, stroke, heart attack, and blood clots in the lung, but couldn’t transfer them to ICUs because “they’re all full” with people who had COVID-19. He warned that if patients get sick then they’ll have to wait as long as “days” for a bed to open up…


“In over 20 years of doing this I have never been this busy or this stressed or seen this many sick people,” he said.

reported by Business Insider

There is lots more anecdotal evidence of health care provider burnout and grieving families begging people to get vaccinated.


Many health workers will have the problem solved for them because many governments are mandating vaccines for them. It’s not a new idea, but it is adding a new vaccine to the list of vaccines already required in their field. And some health care workers have already quit rather than comply. They’re certainly not in the majority, but they do exist.


Do mandates work? Again, not a new question as vaccines and vax hesitancy have been around for a long time. 


Short answer: no. Coercion is not the most effective way to address people fearful of a new type of vaccine.


What does work? Dr. Kimberly Manning’s approach: education, persuasion, listening, and not judging.


If I get kicked off my blogging platforms for saying that, so be it.


Maybe I’ll just go archive my post from a few months ago: “Divided We Fall May Be COVID’s Underlying Purpose.”

Want More Jobs In Maine? Stop Building Warships

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We are often told here in Maine that Bath Iron Works, our shipyard owned by war industry behemoth General Dynamics, can only build warships because “jobs.”

The implication that only Pentagon contracts can provide jobs at union wages with benefits is false. But war contracting is insanely profitable, so the politicians owned by the war industry make sure to also repeat this false talking point.

Maine’s congressional delegation knows that building a roster of useful things at BIW would actually produce more good, union jobs than building warships does. 

Far more, in fact.

They know because for years their constituents have been sharing economists’ research demonstrating this fact. And they know because, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, BIW actually did this.

Below is my op-ed on actual conversion to building for healthcare, published in the Bangor Daily News June 7, 2020 :

Bath Iron Works leads the way in conversion to peaceful production

Last month, a milestone was reached. No, not the 100,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States, though it is related to that sobering statistic. Rather, it’s that heritage shipyard Bath Iron Works has taken its first step in a conversion to building valuable tools for humanity instead of weapons of war.

Specifically, in response to a pandemic that has infected more than 6 million people, BIW is manufacturing machines needed to produce nasal swabs used for testing. These nasal swabs are a specialized diagnostic tool, and shortages due to limited manufacturing have led to headlines like, “ Many nursing homes still haven’t tested any residents or staff for the coronavirus.”

Even better, several of BIW’s subcontractors are also contributing to the effort to make these essential items for protecting the public’s health.

As part of a coalition that for years has called on BIW’s owner, General Dynamics, to convert the shipyard to producing solutions to the climate crisis rather than weapon systems that contribute to it, I am greatly encouraged by this news. What’s more, we now have a blueprint for how BIW can continue to provide great union jobs, while no longer creating war ships that are increasingly irrelevant and costly.First, there must be a clear and pressing problem and sophisticated manufacturing tasks that address it. Certainly, COVID-19 fits the bill; the machines are for customer Puritan Medical Group in Guildford, one of only two facilities in the world that had been making the sophisticated swabs (the other is in Italy) necessary for accurate testing. So, too, does the climate crisis. Maine knows all too well how quickly our valuable fishing waters are warming and the increasing frequency of violent storms that knock out power and endanger lives. Only with increasingly smart renewable energy technology and considerable changes in behavior can we hope to avert increasing disaster.

Second, there must be political will to address the problem. In this case, Puritan chief financial officer reports that Sen. Angus King and other government officials called on Puritan to increase capacity to address the testing deficit. For the climate crisis, as many as 60 percent of registered voters are in support of a Green New Deal — BIW and our elected officials both must take heed of the people’s will.

Third, BIW needs monetary incentives. In this case, the speed and efficiency with which management used federal funding available under the CARES Act is astonishing and impressive. And yet the $75.5 million funded through the Defense Production Act is a pittance in comparison with the multiple billions needed to create Navy destroyers. Think of what that kind of cash infusion could do for the renewable energy industry.

Finally, there is the need for collaboration. While we have often heard how difficult conversion would be, given all of the subcontractors and partners involved, it appears BIW has managed to collaborate with more than 10 other Maine businesses in a matter of weeks. This is both incredibly impressive and exhilarating, as it suggests so much potential for addressing the climate crisis in collective fashion.

When Bath Iron Works remained open to continue building war ships during a global pandemic, it was clear our priorities were badly misplaced. Claiming that building yet another war ship is an “essential” business, when we already have more destroyers than all the other navies in the world combined, is the kind of poor thinking that has characterized the executive branch of the federal government during this crisis.

But maybe we have finally turned a corner. It’s now clear the conversion of BIW to peaceful production is entirely possible, as this rapid shift to address a critical medical shortage shows. And it need not come at the expense of good union jobs. On the contrary, economists’ research has demonstrated time and again that building weapon systems is a poor jobs program in terms of the number of jobs generated. Their estimates show converting BIW to produce clean energy systems instead of war ships would generate roughly 50 percent more jobs — with the same investment — than the 6,000 employed before the pandemic.

A demilitarized Green New Deal is the obvious course forward for a country full of workers desperate for good jobs. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Lisa Savage is an Independent Green candidate for U.S. Senate.