Thoughts on the Needle in My Shoulder
Or how this could have been so much worse under Donald Trump
Yesterday I got the first of two doses of the COVID vaccine. Pfizer, if you must know.
I got my vaccine the same place I went to my junior prom, which is a weird place for two big-ish life events to both happen.
As the needle stuck out of my left shoulder, I got emotional thinking about the prior year: the anticipation of COVID coming to America, educating our older family members that this was real and coming, outfitting them with N95 masks, living through the worst of the first wave in Brooklyn, the horrendously botched response to it and subsequent politicization of centuries of public health learnings (we knew masks worked from past plagues, going back hundreds of years), missing my family and friends, the 500,000+ people who lost their lives because our government could have done more and just flat out refused to, the businesses that closed, the people who lost their jobs, graduations that never really happened, college deferments, a rise in pregnancies, elections.
