The Pfizer vaccine trial I’m a part of went up for review yesterday before a review panel of outside experts convened by the Federal Drug Administration. The panel recommended that the vaccine be approved. Odds are the F.D.A. will grant approval later this evening.

This comes at a very dark period in which we’re seeing an exponential increase in cases and deaths here in Los Angeles and the rest of the country. As more than one panelist noted yesterday, we’re looking at many hospitalizations, deaths and a strained hospital system in the days and weeks ahead. In short the virus is out of control. The vaccine will take many months to roll out and things aren’t returning to normal anytime soon.

Chart of side effects of the Pfizer vaccine from their presentation.

The good news is that the Pfizer vaccine is very safe and 95% effective. Before I decided to participate in the third stage of this trial I carefully went through the results of the first stage as well as the release forms that I had to sign. I’ve since closely followed the results of the third stage and can assure readers of this blog that it’s safe and that side effects are mild to moderate. I’ve heard similar good results from the other mRNA vaccine being developed by Moderna. Yes, there have been a handful of allergic reactions, but those incidents have been exceedingly rare. Your chances of getting Covid are much, much greater than any side effects from the vaccine. Most importantly, by getting the vaccine we express our love and solidarity with health care workers and respect for our elders, the two most vulnerable populations to this disease. Nobody should have to spend their last moments saying goodbye to their loved ones on an iPad especially the doctors and nurses who take care of us when we get sick.

Screen shot of TrialMax app.

My participation in the trial involved a checkup, two blood tests and two injections. This is a placebo controlled study so there’s a 50/50 chance of getting the vaccine or a saline injection. Each week I check in with an app to report if I’ve had any symptoms such as fever or sore throat. The study is projected to last for two years and I will, periodically, go in to have blood taken to monitor for antibodies. The study is blind do I won’t know the results of the antibody tests.

Both the FDA and Pfizer are considering what to do with the placebo group since it would be unethical to ask those in that group to stay un-vaccinated. Some in the F.D.A. suggested keeping the study blind and giving the vaccine to the placebo group and giving the placebo to the already vaccinated group. Pfizer balked at the cost and logistics of doing this and countered with simply vaccinating the placebo group and continuing the study to monitor for long term effectiveness of the vaccine. If this happens the study will no longer be blind and will lose some safety data, but will still yield results on long term effectiveness.

I’m going to guess that Pfizer will get their way. Pfizer proposed vaccinating the placebo group in the order that everyone else in a given state or municipality is vaccinated. This would start with health care workers, who make up around 20% of the third stage trial as well as nursing home residents. Judging from my lack of side effects, I think I’m in the placebo group and I’m more than happy to stay a part of the placebo group until my turn comes up for vaccination. I don’t think I should get special treatment and jump ahead of the line just because I’m in the clinical trial. Right now we need healthy nurses more than we need healthy bloggers (Is their anytime that equation is reversed? Probably not). Pfizer suggested that those of us in the study would jump to the head of the vaccination line within our respective age/need groups as the vaccine becomes available.

The silver lining to any crisis is that it forces us to do things once deemed not possible. A crisis, of course, can be exploited for good or bad. My hope is that one of the lessons we will take from this difficult period will be a sense that we all need to work together. The press tends to focus on anti-maskers and Covid deniers but I think, at least where I live, most people know that the reason we take precautions is for the sake of other people, particularly those who grow and deliver food as well as health care workers who take care of us when we get sick.

What air travel looks like as of the publishing of this blog post on Wednesday at 5pm PST.

Thanksgiving? Current mood is Cranksgiving, that feeling when you type out three angry blog posts, think better of it and fail to push the publish button. So rather than that one belabored and cranky post I offer up a few fragments longer than an aphorism but just short for a proper rant. Here we go:

It’s Never Time for Brunch
We seem trapped, in this country, between two heads of the same neoliberal hydra. One party that denies the reality of the pandemic and another party that demands that people stay home (which, to be clear, we need to do) but offers no help to those who can’t work. We need to pay people to stay home. It’s not fair to bail out wall street but kick workers and small businesses to the curb.

Covid Denial
Why do people deny the reality of Covid? Because, counter-intuitively, it’s rational to do so. If your organizing principle in life is the pursuit of personal happiness, which is what we were all brought up with, then it makes no sense to change your lifestyle to prevent the spread of the virus . Most of us are unlikely to get coronovirus and if we do odds are we’ll recover (though, I have to say I sure don’t want to take the risk–I’m just trying to imagine why some people don’t seem to care). The problem with this kind of selfish thinking is that if I get coronovirus I’m also likely to spread it to other people who will then, possibly, bring it into the household of a multi-generational family, a nursing home, a hospital or a prison where it will grow exponentially and kill a lot of people. But unless I’m a health care worker, odds are those deaths will be out of my sight. Another problem is that if I do behave well and take precautions I’ll never see that my actions had an effect. Since Covid denialism is ideological and baked into our culture, I don’t think we should blame individuals for espousing it. Rather we need to focus our energy on changing the systems that promote toxic individualism. Let’s tell stories about solidarity instead. Not me us, in other words.

Stats, stats, stats and more stats
I never studied statistics. Most people never studied statistics. This is probably why there are so many statistical errors in the media. If I’m spotting them it must drive the mathematically inclined insane. Most of us seem to be especially bad at appreciating exponential growth in something like, say, a communicable disease.

Junk Science
This pandemic is also a reminder that, as research has shown, at least half of all science studies are junk. Unfortunately the press has a bad tendency to uncritically report on junk science. The crappy New York Times repeated a easily discredited study this week that purported to show that masks don’t make a difference. The very basic problem with this study is that the virus is spreading in households where people don’t wear masks, which this study failed to account for. We have better editorial standards here at Root Simple than they do at the Grey Lady and we’re pretty sloppy. Makes you wonder what else they’re getting wrong . . .

Good Science
A study in India shows how Covid is spreading: children and young adults are bringing the virus into multi-generation households. So, unfortunately, it looks like putting kids in school right now isn’t a great idea. Most schools in this country closed for the 1918 flu epidemic so this isn’t a new situation.

Covid Theater
I was perusing our local health department’s new closing guidelines and came to the conclusion that they are just making stuff up on the fly. Some things are open and some closed and it’s obvious that the decisions aren’t based on any research since their probably isn’t any. When you see a multi page list of directions for “model airplane facilities” you know they are winging it. Again, the solution is simple. In a surge like we’re having right now, close everything except what we need to survive and pay everyone to stay home until we can get the numbers down. Do this periodically until we get vaccinated.

Let’s Cancel Thanksgiving Permanently
Capitalism, as Mark Fisher often noted, is great at causing anxiety and then selling solutions. Think of the way women are made to feel body anxiety and then sold beauty products and plastic surgery. The same applies to the holidays. Make people anxious and then offer a Butterball hotline. How about we skip this particular holiday permanently? Who’s in (or out) on the cancel Thanksgiving idea? At least this year, a pandemic seems like the perfect excuse not to fly somewhere to eat dried out turkey.

My New Hustle
I was joking with a friend about writing a book called “Rhetoric for Families: how to have an argument at the dinner table.” Talk about creating an anxiety and selling a solution! Who wants this book?

Wherever you are and whatever you are doing or not doing, Root Simple wishes you a happy holiday season. Please stay safe. If you’re bored check out this flight tracking website and be thankful you’re not traveling.

In an attempt to cope with this crisis we all find ourselves in I reached back and re-read Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Thanks to the library’s free reading app I was also able to read Fisher’s K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, an anthology of his blog posts, interviews and magazine articles. If there’s a ghost that haunts my everyday thoughts it’s Mark Fisher. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about Fisher’s thoughtstylings.

I’ll have to devote a longer blog post to why I think Fisher’s work is important for me, a lowly homesteading blogger. But let me just say that he does a better job than I did of explaining why theory is important to consider rather than dismiss. It turns out that the most rarefied and abstract theories of your Deleuzes and Foucaults can, paradoxically, turn out to be more practical than those who preach the practical.

In a magazine article he wrote in 2009, “Real Abstraction: the application of theory to the modern world” he says of the 2008 financial crisis, “Understanding the credit crunch and the recession demands the acknowledgment that abstractions are real.”

Fisher struggled with and wrote perceptibly about depression. Sadly we lost him too suicide in 2017, but his writing becomes more and more relevant as time goes on. You can read his blog here. If we weren’t in the midst of the need to social distance I’d be grabbing strangers, shaking them and yelling READ CAPITALIST REALISM! I feel like Fisher’s writing is a kind of key that unlocks a door on the horrors and mysteries of our present moment as well as offering a possible way out.

• I’m going to stick my neck out here and predict that there won’t be a civil war anytime soon here in the Heart of Babylon. We might have some isolated incidents over the next few days that the press will amplify. But most folks on all sides of the political spectrum are too busy just coping with the effects of a pandemic and the demands of family and work to storm the Bastille. I could be wrong. We’ll see how well this post ages.
• Doomscrolling twitter and looking at the news too much isn’t healthy. It leads to paranoia and the feeling that a civil war in the Heart of Babylon is imminent.
• Whatever happens in the next week it’s not time to make brunch reservations. In this election we face a choice between a kind of incompetent proto-fascism (real fascists would organize the buses better at their rallies) and neoliberalism. Proto-fascism is worse but neoliberalism sows the seeds of fascism by worsening conditions for working class and middle class people. In short, neoliberal austerity, international trade deals and anti-labor measures create an opportunity for right wing populists. To be clear I think we need to first evict the fascists and then take on the neoliberals. It’s a long game–they’ll be no brunch for the rest of my life.
• My LA neighborhood is a liberal bubble. There are no Trump signs. But there are plenty of signs screaming “VOTE.” I find this message irritating and condescending, especially when directed at young people. My response is “VOTE for what?” Give me something to vote for not empty platitudes like “Decency.” What does that even mean? How about Medicare for All? Access to higher education? How about not sending poor kids off to wars?
• Don’t forget local politics. Everyone is distracted by the soap opera in Washington. Meanwhile, here in Los Angeles, our local politicians, almost all Democrats, are engaged in old-school corruption: suitcases full of cash, partying with developers at casinos and cavorting with sex workers.
• Speaking of LA I have a message to the folks in the rest of this country: you don’t want our mayor Eric Garcetti in a cabinet position even though I’d love to see him be someone else’s problem. He’s another neolib who wants Uber to run everything.
• Politics should not be about personal expression. It’s about working with other people towards a common goal. This has been an especially hard lesson for me. I think we’re all raised in a culture of self expression and social media only exacerbates this.
• Political discussions are difficult when you base your identity on them. I have an only child’s sense of being Always Right™. I’ve done a lot of phone and text banking and knocking on doors for campaigns in the last 11 months. The lessons learned are: spend most of your time listening to what other people are saying. Ask open ended questions. Never tell someone that they are WRONG™. Pivot gracefully to what your opinions are. Don’t argue with people. This is all easier said than done and harder when you have political conversations with friends and family.
• When you make calls for a campaign you quickly learn that you are a political nerd who spends too much time looking at Twitter. Most people are busy taking care of a crying baby, working the night shift on a job they hate and/or just trying to cope with life.

I’m going to leave the last word to Bertolt Brecht:

It takes a lot things to change the world:
Anger and tenacity. Science and indignation,
The quick initiative, the long reflection,
The cold patience and the infinite perseverance,
The understanding of the particular case and the understanding of the ensemble:
Only the lessons of reality can teach us to transform reality.