Vaccine

The White House falsely claimed Thursday that there were no Covid-19 vaccines available when President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. "When President Biden took office, millions were unemployed and there was no vaccine available," the official White House account tweeted. In truth, the first vaccines were administered under the FDA's emergency-use authorization in mid-December of 2020. They were developed under the Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed", a public-private partnership wherein the federal government invested billions of dollars into vaccine development and brokered a deal with pharmaceutical companies to purchase the vaccines once they were approved.

I was seven months pregnant in March, 2020. I had miscarried before, and it had taken a little while to conceive, so even before the world became anxious about reports of a novel coronavirus, I was a nervous wreck. When the pandemic came in earnest, I was utterly overcome. I had been working on a live news show. Every day in late February, and even at the very beginning of March, we were telling Americans to wash their hands, but that everything would be okay. Local politicians and medical experts came on the show to tell people it was all going to be fine. This was The Before. One day, I came into the studio during a commercial.

It’s 4 a.m. and instead of sleep, powerlessness is on my mind. It’s a concept I’m quite familiar with, being that I’m in recovery: it’s the idea one must embrace to “take the first step.” The idea is, by admitting your powerlessness over whatever behavior or substance you are abusing, you begin on the journey of liberating yourself from the bondage of addiction. It’s a paradox I had a hard time reconciling in my early days of sobering up. A great line about step one in some of the Alcoholics Anonymous literature plays on a loop as I stare at the ceiling. “Who cares to admit complete defeat. Practically no one, of course. Every natural instinct cries out against the idea of personal powerlessness.” However, the list of things I’m powerless over has grown long.