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month of May

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By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. It’s a shock that it’s May 1st because the new month is always a surprise.

It’s something to talk about, I suppose, and it suggests that time continues to move in the only direction we have ever experienced. 

In the realm of things I can’t believe, I’d like to share a few items that range from the trivial to the surreal, without touching most of the third rails in our lives.

For starters, I can’t believe it’s over 24 years since Y2K. Remember all the hullabaloo about how every electronic system we had might fail at the start of the year 2000? People were afraid to fly, imagined that their computers would malfunction and that all manner of automated systems would get something between a computer version of the hiccups and malfunction completely. It seems like only yesterday and yet a world away that we were concerned about the year 2000.

Speaking of 2000, I remember calculating how incredibly old I’d be in 2000. And yet, here we are, 24 years, and counting, later. Gulp!

I don’t remember the first or even the last manned moon landing. I was alive, but not old enough to process any of the remarkable moments in the space program. Now, NASA is planning a manned trip around the moon next year and, in 2026, intends to send astronauts to the moon’s south pole. I’m excited to see people hopping around in lighter gravity while wearing modern spacesuits. I wonder if those outfits will have corporate logos and if the astronauts will send us live feeds from their helmet cams.

On a more personal level, I can’t believe the milestones that the next generation has passed. Our daughter graduated from college, our nephew got married, and our son will vote in the next presidential election for the first time.

Speaking of the presidential election, I can’t believe two candidates who evoke such ire, scorn and disappointment nationally are running yet again. I know we’re slowly marching towards yet another tight race between two angry older men, but I can’t help wondering why neither party and the electorates couldn’t come up with another alternative.

That doesn’t include Robert Kennedy Jr. who isn’t exactly a unifier. Even his siblings have disowned him politically, vowing to vote for President Joe Biden rather than their anti-vax relative.

On a more mundane level, I can’t believe how infrequently I have gone to the movies. From the time we started dating, my wife and I loved the movies. We’d make sure we got to the theater early, waited for overpriced popcorn and, back in the day when I could eat M&M’s and other chocolate candies, would mix candy into the bucket to create a salty-sweet movie snack.

At the end of the movie, we’d get the free popcorn refill and bring it home, where our daughter would pick at it that night or the next morning, listening to a synopsis of the film.

We still watch movies and, as readers of this column may remember, attended “Oppenheimer” in person, but we haven’t planned an evening around a trip to the movies in years.

On the many plus sides of technology, I can’t believe how much easier the logistics of life are with a phone that redirects me when I go the wrong way, that allows me to connect with friends and family all over the world, and that calls anyone in my contact list without my needing to remember a phone number or even dialing or pushing buttons. I still remember the phone numbers of some high school and college friends, not that I’d ever need them, especially since their families have either moved away or given up their land lines.

Oh, and, thanks to my sister-in-law’s efforts to go through older files in my mom’s house, I now have a collection of photos from my high school graduation and prom. I can’t believe I thought that mustache looked good. Then again, that was the age of Tom Selleck and Magnum PI. Much as I might blame the actor for my facial hair, I was more likely following the stylings of my older brother, the family trendsetter.

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

“It’s May, it’s May, the merry month of May!”  according to the Elizabethan poem by Thomas Dekker and then twisted a bit to “lusty month of May” by “Camelot’s” Lerner and Loewe. I’m willing to believe them, if you are, and there are a couple of items of good news that we can celebrate in our war against the novel coronavirus as the
month begins.

First is the unexpected progress coming from the University of Oxford toward a vaccine. Despite the earliest hopes for such an effective halt to the COVID-19 pandemic involving a 12 to 18- month timetable, which would suggest toward the end of 2021, it turns out that scientists at Oxford’s Jenner Institute are way ahead. 

They have been holding previous clinical trials against an earlier coronavirus that are proving harmless to humans. Having cleared that major hurdle, now they can go to the head of the international race. They will be holding trials involving over 6,000 people with their new vaccine toward the end of the month. Not only do they want to show that the vaccine is safe but also that it works.

Then, “with an emergency approval from regulators, the first few million doses of their vaccine could be available by September — at least several months ahead of any of the other announced efforts — if it proves to be effective,” according to an article by David D. Kirkpatrick that appeared on the front page of this past Tuesday’s The New York Times.

There is evidence from the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana that this new Oxford vaccine may indeed work. It has been in a limited animal trial there and found to protect against COVID-19.

Other scientists at Oxford “are working with a half dozen drug manufacturing companies across Europe and Asia to prepare to churn out billions of doses as quickly as possible if the vaccine is approved. None have been granted exclusive marketing rights, and one is the giant Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest supplier of vaccines,” according to the Times. The idea of having several is to obtain billions of doses quickly and to avoid anyone making a lot of money from the pandemic.

There are a couple of American companies that are also doing research, along the same lines as Oxford, of altering the virus’s genetic material and conducting small clinical trials. They too must demonstrate both safety and effectiveness. The same goes for a Chinese company.

Another avenue of defense against COVID-19 is the use of blood plasma from the disease’s survivors on other desperately ill patients. Again, according to another article in Wednesday’s The New York Times by Audra D.S. Burch and Amy Harmon, the treatment may work. This involves finding survivors, with the same blood type as the ill patient, who will then volunteer to donate blood. The plasma in that blood, now termed convalescent plasma, is then injected into the gravely ill patient in order to bolster the patient’s immune system with new antibodies, “giving him more soldiers in his body to fight this war,” said Dr. Leslie Diaz, an infectious disease specialist at the Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center in South Florida where there was such treatment administered.

Initially to find such a donor, a frantic search was launched on social media that discovered an appropriate donor some 80 miles away. There is now a national program overseen by the Mayo Clinic, with the approval of the Food and Drug Administration, to use this experimental treatment on 2500 patients in U.S. hospitals. It should be said, however, that it is not clear whether having antibodies that are not their own would ultimately help or harm patients. This is only an experimental treatment under study.

So as we leave April behind, we should salute the American writer, T. S. Eliot, who began his 1922 landmark poem, “The Waste Land” with the words, “April is the cruelest month.” A hundred years earlier, he knew.

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