Below is the full, unedited text of a story written by a scientist who knew better. Please contact Covid Stories Archive if you would like to use or reproduce this essay, in whole or in part, for your research or writing. Also, please consider sharing your own stories for preservation in our archive.
As the pandemic unfolded in early 2020, I didn’t pay too much attention to it because I read the news instead of watching it on television, and the scientists advising the President seemed to be following the usual pandemic playbooks. I remember Dr. Fauci telling people to still go on cruises on February 29th. I am a California-based scientist that worked with viruses as tools, so I read some of the stories about early tracing and age gradients of serious COVID cases as a scientific curiosity. The first time I really started to pay attention to the panic was when my daughter’s private school had a scheduled trip to Disneyland on March 6, 2020, and some of the parents didn’t want to go. The rest of us managed to talk them out of their fears at least for the day, and I’m so glad we went on that trip anyway. It was almost our last “normal” before the storm of the following week. (And we had Disneyland almost all to ourselves!) My daughter’s private school closed on March 13th, on the recommendation of the county health department, even though our county (Ventura) only had one case of COVID-19. I was livid. If our county only had one case of COVID-19, we just made our standard for re-opening zero cases, which would be an impossibility. I told the other parents in our class to kiss the rest of their school year goodbye, and they laughed and said I was being irresponsible, and that the school would reopen in a little while. Of course, it didn’t.
As a scientist, this made no sense to me. I had read about COVID community spread in Washington state weeks earlier, and knew that if the virus was already out in the community, then there was no stopping or slowing it. All of our pandemic playbooks acknowledged that fact, emphasized keeping things as normal as possible, and we were doing the exact opposite. I was also starting to hear about mass PCR testing for the virus, which as a scientist that uses PCR in her work, I thought was a terrible idea. PCR only tells you if viral genomic material is present or absent. It does not tell you what state the virus is in. You need a cell-based assay for that. Much like being in the doctor’s office for strep, you may get a rapid test to indicate that it might be strep, they have to send it out for culture to confirm. We had never done mass PCR testing on this level before, so we had no context for how much virus (active or not) we would find in people. It would probably be a lot. This was guaranteed to cause panic.
I started researching more of the data available on COVID, hoping to find information I could send to my daughter’s school and the county health department to convince them to re-open the schools. I laugh now to think that they might have listened to me, but I’m glad I found what I did then. I found the Ioannidis Medium article on the Diamond Princess, and Justin Hart’s first Medium article questioning the COVID data and our current path of action. I was part of an early “Team Reality” zoom call, and it was so nice just to see 6 other people that agreed with me that what we were doing was insane. (Fortunately, my husband also agreed with me the whole time.) I am thankful that since I work in a scientific field, I had access to all the journal articles being published about COVID. I also found a very interesting article about why respiratory virus outbreaks happen, which challenged a lot of the common assumptions parroted by the news for COVID and other respiratory viral outbreaks, such as cold/dry air influencing survival, and crowding. Patrick Shaw Stewart, a UK protein crystallographer, had looked into the work of Hope Simpson on seasonality and posed what I thought was a much more logical hypothesis, that these viruses are activated by temperature fluctuations. (So your grandmother was right and wearing a coat is important.) I contacted him via Twitter, and we ended up writing a publication together in May 2021 to update his original hypothesis for COVID (https://doi.org/10.1002/rmv.2241). We are still trying to get other scientists to listen to this idea, as we think it has important implications for our pandemic tactics. It also calls into question our focus on stopping transmission (a fool’s errand), as the literature definitely shows that viruses are everywhere all the time, and your best bet is to either keep them from activating (by not getting cold), try to decrease your susceptibility (improve general health) or develop successful treatments.
I spent most of the pandemic going out as much as possible, with my husband and daughter. We went to restaurants that were defying the lockdown orders. We drove to the beach for no reason. I made curbside pickup orders just to have a reason to drive somewhere. I kept all my doctor’s appointments in person. Fortunately, I had some friends that agreed that the lockdown measures and NPIs were insane. I had a trip planned to visit a friend in Michigan in July 2020, and we went on that trip as planned. We had a wonderful time. It was eerie to come back to LAX and see the departures deck of the airport completely empty. (I have a photo of that, which I will attach below and I plan to have framed to remind me of hubris.) I am thankful that my church, which is small and could “fly under the radar” never closed. My pastor believed that we can’t be a proper church if we don’t get together and support each other through life’s problems. He did create “drive through communion” for a while for the people that were very afraid, but fortunately most of them came back to church after a few weeks. My daughter’s best friend’s family was definitely more nervous than we were about COVID, but they never disallowed our daughters from seeing each other in person, for which I am also so grateful. So many kids were not as lucky.
My job didn’t change much for a while. At first, they closed our labs, then quickly realized they would have to delay timelines. I went back in to work in early April, with hazard pay (!) and instructions to stay six feet apart. Then the masks came in and I rolled my eyes but kept working. Unfortunately, they started with mandatory weekly testing in August 2020. I saw this as crossing a line. My employer should not be able to mandate that I take a medical test and share the results with them, with the exception of drug tests. I also thought mandatory testing would turn into a mandatory vaccine policy once vaccines were available. I objected to the testing, and thought I probably would be fired. My director was supportive even though she did not personally agree with me, and worked with HR to get me a remote position that I could do from home and not test. Since my job was half advisory, and I had a lot of documents and publication drafts to work on, this suited me fine. I worked this way for over a year, and then the vaccine mandate (mandated by my employer, not the state) that I was expecting materialized. I submitted a religious exemption, but it was rejected. My director and I talked to HR for several weeks, trying to find a solution, but even though I was a remote worker, I was forced to resign as of October 29th, 2021. I’m glad I made it to my 20 year anniversary with the company, which was 8/1/21, and that my co-workers threw me an (outdoor) going away party.
I still live in Southern California, for now. Fortunately, another company decided that my industry experience made it worthwhile to hire me, even though I am still unvaccinated. I cannot bring myself to take a pharmaceutical product that was only tested for a few months, and definitely has not lived up to its promises. My family has had its COVID experience as well, as my husband (also not vaccinated) was very sick with it in December 2021. Thankfully, I knew a good doctor to call (Dr. Mollie James) and she treated him very successfully with prescription and OTC drugs (all not on the totally inadequate NIH/CDC “approved” list.) I wish doctors like her, with good track records treating COVID, were giving seminars to other doctors so that fewer people would wind up in the hospital or worse. I don’t understand why that isn’t happening. I am hoping that California will not pass some of the draft bills they are considering, such as the one requiring COVID vaccination for employment, or for schools. We will likely have to leave for another state if that happens. I think it is tragic how self-inflicted all of this damage is from our overreaction to a moderately dangerous respiratory illness. I certainly pray that we can right the ship, hold some people accountable for their terribly damaging mistakes and poor choices, and get back on track. But as my pastor says, “We knew the world was fallen and kind of crazy, but we didn’t think it was this crazy.” I hope we can wrest control from the “crazy”. But even if we don’t, I believe God is in control and all we can do is trust in Him, and keep on living until He decides that our work is done.
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