
Death has a way. Yes, it does.
It has its way. Yes, it does.
Has its way of telling us, emphatically and without argument: I win.
No matter what you think. No matter what you do.
No matter what you believe.
It wins.
It’s a shame some folk may need death to have its way before they embrace the emphatic truth. Before they accept that COVID-19, the worst of it, far and away proven, is worse than anything you believe about the vaccine.
For too many now, COVID-19 is death. Unnecessarily so. It’s fear. It’s hospitalization. It’s incubation. It’s being separated from loved ones. Because you’re not vaccinated. Period.
Perhaps never to see them again. Perhaps never to breathe again.
Perhaps.
It wins.
Thank God for Dr. Brytney Cobia at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham. Thank God she shared what she sees. That she shared the unmitigated fear, the unvarnished regret she sees in the eyes of patients—all but one of whom were unvaccinated, she shared on Facebook and later reiterated with my colleague Dennis Pillion—before she intubates them. Before they die.
As they ask for the vaccine. Plead for it.
“I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry,” she wrote on social media,” but it’s too late.”
Seven-day infection rates are skyrocketing in our state, rising faster than bazillonaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos spurt into space. Rising at the rate of eight-fold in a dang month. Almost 700 Alabamians are now hospitalized with COVID-19; a month ago fewer than 200 people were hospitalized due to the virus.
And death is laughing. Ninety-six-point-four percent of COVID-19 deaths are among the unvaccinated.
Jefferson Couth Health Officer Dr. Mark Wilson was in tears this time last year, when the global pandemic was at its peak, when hospitals—and their brave workers—were being gutted by COVID-19.
When death was winning big time.
Now, as we stubbornly lag dead last in vaccinations, as the unvaccinated blithely go about life as if the pandemic is over, as if they’ve won, death is guffawing.
It’s having its way.
And Wilson is trying not to cry again.
“The tragic thing is that almost all of these deaths will have been prevented if only those people had been vaccinated,” he said last week.
Those people. People like Martin and Trina Daniel.
They’re dead now, after just 59 and 49 years of life, respectively, after being married for 22 years. After refusing to get vaccinated because starting 90 years ago, Black men were egregiously used as guinea men in a heinous experiment at Tuskegee University to determine the effect of syphilis on them while failing to treat them. The experiment endured for decades; someone should have been jailed for it, but no one ever was.
Martin graduated from Tuskegee. He and Trina lived in Savannah, Ga. That’s where they were when, yes, death had its way
Martin’s nephew, Cornelius Daniel, told WSB-TV in Atlanta: “Just tying [the Tuskegee experiment and COVID-19] together and understanding the historical context of what’s going on, it really wears on me sometimes.”
I don’t want another Alabamian to die from COVID-19. Period.
I don’t care about their politics, about their stance on social justice, voting rights, about crucial race theory even. I don’t care if they’re Black, white, brown, or some other stripe of the rainbow.
I don’t want them to die. I don’t want my heart to sink at the thought of their last moments of regret, their last moments of fear.
I don’t want any more survivors to grieve. I don’t want death to have its way. To keep laughing.
I don’t want death to win. Not anymore.
It’s won enough; It’s had its way. Enough.