Why It Hurt: My Covid-19 Vaccine

My brother and I, both educators, were vaccinated at the Oakland Coliseum on February 26, 2021. His subsequent FB post captured the essence of a conversation we had as we sat in our respective cars waiting for the requisite 15-minute recovery period:

The covid vaccine process and experience is a feat of modernity, societal collaboration, and benevolence. Let’s talk about this good stuff as well as the BS of dystopia. Thanks to the national guard, FEMA, and volunteer personnel. Thanks to the faceless bureaucrats. Thanks to the toiling scientists and the people who clean labs, and yes, even the billionaire philanthropist. Props to the people waiting patiently in line for their turns.

Tears welled in my eyes as I watched the machinery of bureaucracy make it possible for thousands of people to get their dose of hope. I sat in gratitude, and in cognitive dissonance.

The backdrop to my very present feelings of grace and hope was reality: it would be months before everyone had the opportunity to wait their turn in line and, as 400+ years of systemic oppression asserted itself upon the impact of the wait, thousands more would die, and of those, the victims would be disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and Latinx.

Suffice it to say, the throbbing in my left arm reminded me all evening that the road ahead for all of us is riddled with injustice. I felt the throb with gratitude and fear. How long would it be before those I loved were inoculated. How long would it be before those with so little access found their way into local pharmacies, county event centers, and federal locations like the Oakland Coliseum? How long would it be before the anti-vaxxers would be convinced that vaccines are only as powerful as a successful social contract that brings us all along into a vaccinated collective?

In her recently published work The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee brilliantly makes the case that our collective success is not a zero-sum game. And, as the throbbing in my arm gradually subsides, I am left with a deep feeling of gratitude that my dose of hope was coupled with a deep sense of fear and empathy for those yet to be vaccinated. I am grateful to those who made my vaccine possible and cognizant that in my moment of liberation, I understand that my freedom is of little consequence if others are shackled. I understand that our lives are inextricably linked to one another’s. And, I hold out hope that our current reality, a national reckoning with systemic racism and a global pandemic that amplified the tragic impact for “the sum of us” living in a broken system, enables all of us to more fully co-exist in a mindset that centers all of us, instead of one of us.