Day 184…
Last night, in the gravel parking lot behind the Pilgrim House, a white clapboard hotel in the center of Provincetown built in the 1700’s, we sat and watched a show called Drag-a-Maniacs.
Cacophony Daniels and Sutton Lee Seymour, two gloriously insane drag queens from New York City entered wearing plastic shield masks and sequins and officially ended, at least for the moment, the great musical entertainment drought of 2020.
The chairs had been set up outside as per who had bought tickets. Groups of twos and threes were scattered apart from each other across the lot. Because the two performers actually sing their own material rather than lip synch it, even though the three of us were sitting in the front row, we were still kept 25’ away from the stage.
There is absolutely no substitute for sitting together with strangers, albeit distanced, and experiencing a show performed live. We laughed our collective asses off, and yes, we also cried a couple of times. As silly as some of it may have seemed on the surface, as professional theatre performers, both of them knew exactly what they were doing. Cacophony Daniels, in her alter (non-drag) ego, performed the role of Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys many times, so, if nothing else, you know that she can SING.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, in a live interview with Jennifer Garner on Instagram yesterday said that, realistically, the live vaccine will need to have been out for a year before it can be deemed safe.
“If we get a really good vaccine and just about everybody gets vaccinated, you’ll have a degree of immunity in the general community that I think you can walk into a theatre without a mask.”
Suddenly reopening Broadway in March of next year, seems a bit less likely than it did before.
There are at least two big hurdles in what Dr. Fauci said. The first is, “If we get a really good vaccine.”
There are currently over 150 coronavirus vaccines in development the world over. Here in the United States, Operation Warp Speed has pledged $10 billion with the aim of delivering 300 million safe and effective doses by January. The World Health Organization is trying to coordinate efforts across the globe in order to be able to distribute 2 billion doses of an effective vaccine by the end of next year.
The aim of any vaccine is to help our body’s immune systems create a defense against a given virus that is stronger than what it would create on its own. Anytime we become infected with something, the body tries to defend against it.
When Michael and I got COVID-19 back in March, our bodies were able to create enough antibodies to defeat it in just a few days. There’s no guarantee that were we faced with a different strain of it, that our immune systems would be as efficient.
Some vaccines typically use the virus itself to create these antibodies. If you can kill the actual virus, and just send in its outer protective protein shell, the body can attack that and eventually figure out how to beat it. If it fails, there is no consequence because the actual nucleus of virus has been removed. You can also send in weakened versions of the virus so that the body can essentially practice against a less able opponent.
There are other ways as well, you can implant the COVID-19 proteins into a harmless virus that is incapable of causing infection or you can send in fragments of the COVID-19 genetic material that the body can fight piecemeal.
All 150 different vaccines currently being developed are trying something somewhat different to see what works. Unfortunately, they aren’t going to be ready by next week.
It can typically take 10-15 years to develop a vaccine to the point that it can be distributed. The current record holder for speed was the vaccine for mumps which took four years. Forty years later, despite a huge global effort, there is still NO effective vaccine for HIV/AIDS.
When we all get our yearly vaccines against the normal flu, they are rarely completely effective. There are so many different strains of flu out there that it is almost impossible to predict which one is going to be the most widespread in any given year. Health officials literally have to guess a full year or so before which of the flus they think it’s going to be then they decide to produce that particular kind of vaccine.
I remember my doctor telling me at my last exam that the vaccine from the year before had somewhat missed the mark. It ended up being only about 20% effective. Even 20% effective, though, is better than none.
There’s a children’s game called Telephone. You line up and the person in front of the line makes up a sentence and whispers it to the person behind them and it passes along the line until it gets to the last person. The last person then says out loud what they heard, and everyone laughs because it usually bears no relation to the original sentence at all.
That seems to be a bit like how the virus passes. If you have a hundred people in line and the first person gets it, it passes fairly easily to the next person and so on and so on, all the way down the line. If 20% of the people are inoculated it’s as if every 5th person gets removed from the line. The virus has a more difficult time jumping the gap from person 4 to person 6.
The more people you remove from the line, the less likely it is to be able to spread. Even at 20%, if rather than removing every 5th person, you just remove 5 people in a row, you’ve basically stopped it being able to jump at all.
There are several steps that all of these 150 different groups of people are putting their potential vaccine through. The first step is seeing whether they trigger an immunity response in a few, otherwise healthy, individuals. The second step, if that one works, is to increase the pool of people to include people who may already have the disease or be more likely to catch it. The third step is to increase the pool even further to include people from all ages and backgrounds and with differing underlying health conditions to see how they do.
If the vaccine gets through all of those stages well, it then gets sent to the regulatory agencies for approval - something that can be an extremely lengthy process. It is important that the regulatory agencies do their job thoroughly because the companies who create these viruses may have missed something. In some cases, they also may be hiding something.
There is the potential for a great deal of money to be made off of an effective vaccine so the occasional unfortunate side-effect from any given vaccine may be glossed over by its creators in the hope that nobody will notice. Thorough vetting by a regulatory agency like the FDA and the CDC is designed to weed that out.
While everybody is impatient for a vaccine to be delivered, these steps need to be followed.
Our President is desperate to get a vaccine out on the market before the election. He and his Administration are pressuring these regulatory agencies to streamline the process and skip these incredibly important steps.
That brings us to the second big hurdle from Dr. Fauci’s interview, “…and just about everybody gets vaccinated.”
A recent poll has already said that 40% of Americans will not let themselves be inoculated with a rushed vaccine. There is already a growing section of the population who are against vaccines in general, falsely believing that they cause autism.
Mistakes were certainly made in the past, nothing is 100% safe, but by and large, vaccines that have been thoroughly tested, both by the people who created them and by the regulatory agencies have proven to be overwhelming safe to use.
If a COVID-19 vaccine is rushed into production without being properly tested and something happens, it’s all over. Many more people will lose their faith in vaccines in general and the anti-vaxxers will have been proven right.
Say a vaccine is created. It is tested. It is vetted. It goes through the whole process and everybody agrees that it’s the one. Now it needs to be manufactured and distributed.
Creating 300 million doses of a new vaccine is a monumental undertaking. Who gets it first? Who decides that? Does it end up being our frontline emergency health care workers who need it the most or does it end up being the super-rich who can buy their way into the front of the queue?
Given our Administration’s record so far, I’m betting on the latter.
We had a great time at the show last night. It wasn’t a perfect way to see it. We couldn’t really all feel each other laughing together but we could all, at least, hear and see each other. And we NEEDED it.
No matter how long any of this takes, theatre will not die. You can Zoom all you want, but nothing replaces what we get from a live performance.
NOTHING.
That sense of shared experience and a shared emotional journey is simply not possible in any other medium. We WILL get back to it.
We are just going to have to slog through the desert for a while searching for whatever water we can find, wherever we can find it. Thanks to Cacophony Daniels and Sutton Lee Seymour and the good people of Pilgrim House, we got a great big cool clear gulp of it, last night.
We will have to make it last for as long as we can.
BRAVA!!!
“there is absolutely no substitute for sitting ( in a theatre) with strangers”
💕💕💕
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers....”
My vaccine right now
is to
eat healthy food in moderation
walk in the fresh air & sunlight daily
pray/ meditate
journal
connect with people I love
live my life
each moment with passion & purpose
read Richard Hester’s posts daily
xoxo