What science gave, and what it took

his past Wednesday morning, I was sitting in my mask and goggles at the doctor’s station in the emergency room surrounded by COVID-19 patients waiting for beds to open in the hospital above me. They were quiet, breathing into their oxygen masks behind glass doors, miserable and afraid, alone in their cubicles.

I had nothing to do, unless it was to imagine what it would be like to lie there, where they were. One of the secrets of the pandemic is that it is glacial, and all the waits seem endless. It typically takes many weeks to die, and many weeks to recover, and so little happens in between.

My phone pinged — a group text from Liz, a trauma nurse, addressed to Meredith, a physician’s assistant, and to me. It was an emoji of a dripping syringe.

“Are you ready?” the text read. “Meet me in the hall.”

Slots had opened unexpectedly, on the first day of the vaccine.

So three of us walked out of the ER toward the conference room. The hall was empty at first. But as we drew nearer, others began to join us, and I realized that people were gathering from all over the hospital.

The line was long but fast. One by one we went to the tables, and rolled up our sleeves, and as I felt the alcohol on my skin, and the burn of the needle that followed, I felt nothing but gratitude. I could hear it in all of our voices, and feel it in the oddly light, happy mood of the room.

The speed with which the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, was identified, its genome sequenced, and effective vaccines created against it — all in less than a year — is one of the greatest scientific achievements of the modern age. In the midst of so much chaos and tragedy, finally we have this calm pure thing, a little flash of lightning in our arms.

Science, as a cultural force, has been around for a few hundred years now. Like both money and faith, it informs virtually every aspect of the modern world. And like money and faith, it is aspirational. We want a plentiful future, full of effortless and miraculous machines, and the promise of eternal life.

But these are the fruits of science, not the thing itself. Science is epistemology, not divinity. Yet now, increasingly, it is ceding its traditional role as an objective, cool-headed counselor and nurturing the incoherent passions within us like hothouse flowers.

It is science and its cousin, technology, that have given us the internet and social media, the unwitting champions not of external, independent, empirical truth, but of relativism, and curated, market-driven reinforcement of individual biases and tastes, no matter how dark or misguided.

COVID-19 is not political, not discriminatory, not a hoax, and not even complicated. The threat posed by the virus has been simple all along, and the means to combat it no less clear. But for many in America, it remains little more than an unsettling, resented abstraction, as so many millions of milder cases lock themselves away, and so many thousands of silent, ventilated figures, in every hospital in the country, lie hidden behind closed doors.

Just a few hundred scientists used the hard-won tools of the Enlightenment against this illness, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They, and the belief system that created them, gave us vaccines that will ultimately end the pandemic. But an enormous percentage of humanity responded to COVID-19 with primal suspicions, anger and incoherent, cathartic tribalism instead of with basic common sense and decency. Of all the many observations to be made about this strange dark time, this is the most ominous. This pandemic will pass. The future, however, is full of far greater and more complicated dangers.

So once again we’ve returned to the great divide between heart and mind, between emotion and reason, that both bedevils and defines us. To achieve herd immunity, we need roughly 75% of the population to roll up their sleeves for the needle, to trust in empiricism, and institutions, and good intentions, and unity of purpose.

But none of us were thinking beyond the moment that day. We were just briefly happy, laughing and joking as we walked back to the ER down the long hall.

“Ok, vaccine selfie time!” Meredith said, and we all gathered behind the phone in her outstretched hand, in our masks and goggles and our identical green scrubs. Later, when she texted the photo to us, I saw how anonymous we looked, how faceless, like so many other workers in America, with so many months to go.

Political football

Brooklyn: Gov. Cuomo says 6,700 fans can attend the Buffalo Bills playoff game as long as they pay for their own COVID test and the results are negative. This is the same governor who has crippled small businesses with his ban on indoor dining. He even plans to attend the game. So it’s “do as I say, not as I do.” I understand the fans are excited. I get it. I’m a sports fan. However, with the virus showing no signs of letting up and a new strain on the horizon, we need to use common sense.

John De Angelo

Shots at Congress

Staten Island: Voicer Lisa DeSantis: Does it occur to you that Congress is filled with the elderly, many of whom undoubtedly have underlying conditions? Or that thousands of staffers are also working in close proximity to all the members? And that some of them may also have underlying health issues? (See Mitch McConnell, the bum.) And does it occur to you that these members of Congress by necessity meet with dozens of people daily? You may not like the young AOC, but she and every member and staffer in Congress should be mandated to get the vaccine. Or would you rather the halls of Congress become as full of the virus as the idiot-filled White House? As strongly as I want many members of Congress to figuratively drop dead, I’d much rather they live long, happy lives with their families. Even the despicable cur Josh Hawley. So, maybe have a heart?