Taking My Best Shot: Pondering the COVID Vaccine Controversy

I recently received my second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. Free at last! Free at last! Thank drugs alrighty, I'm free at last! Can I get a "Whoop! Whoop!" 

They even give you a sticker!

I know some in our society would prefer to give me a "Nope! Nope!" Obviously, I prefer to disagree.

I never dreamed that being old, Black, diabetic and having my immune system permanently compromised so as to preserve an adopted kidney could ever be positive attributes. But hey! Whatever plunged the needle into my arm faster was OK by me.

In a sense, receiving the second shot does feel kind of liberating, like getting out of jail. (A feeling which, sadly, I have experienced.) We all have been imprisoned by this coronavirus one way or another, either by being homebound or shackled financially. The vaccines offer us at least the promise of a return to full freedom and normalcy somewhere down the line.

Herd immunity? Of course I herd of immunity. I just don't know when it will arrive.

Injection numero dos also made me feel a bit special, to be honest, as if I had completed a long and valued quest. And if you think that sounds like overstatement, watch the nightly news any evening. You'll see thousands of Americans standing in line for vaccines, asking when they can get their vaccines, wishing they could receive a vaccine and wondering aloud what will happen after their vaccines are administered.

They're the shots heard 'round the country.

Upon arriving at the hotel ballroom that serves as my city's main COVID injection site and completing the necessary paperwork, I was escorted to a very pleasant older woman who was serving as a public health volunteer. Before executing my second shot, she placed a sheet in front of me listing possible side effects.

"After I got my second shot," she sweetly informed, "I had a fever the next day. Then I got chills, and a pounding headache that just would not go away. My injection site swelled up and hurt ––"

I stopped her there. "Are you trying to scare me out of here?" I asked, laughing. Indeed, as I spoke an electronic banner on the wall behind her listed all those "Common Side Effects," adding fatigue to the list.

A Shot in the Arm for America.

Didn't matter. It was going to take more than that to deter me. I had waited too long, worried too much in public settings. I took the shot, sat quietly for the 15 minutes they ask you to stay to make sure there are no immediate allergic reactions, then went home. Easy peasy.

The next day I experienced very mild soreness at the injection site in my left arm. That was it. The sum total of my side effects. Now the CDC is reporting that, for reasons they haven't yet determined, women are 80 percent more susceptible to intense reactions following their second shots than men. 

Sorry, ladies. 

I think I reacted stronger to the response over my initial Moderna shot. I posted the momentous event on Facebook the day after and while reaction was mixed and mostly positive, every Black person who commented on my decision was concerned at best, critical at worst. Even my own sister commented, "Jim, you actually took that shot? OMG, why? I don't know, l'il Bro, but I'm praying everything comes out all right. Love you. Please keep me updated on how you're doing."

Dang, Jacqui, I'm doing great so far. It's not like I'm on a ventilator! In fact, that's precisely what I'm trying to avoid. But that type of immediately negative response from African Americans is not uncommon, from everything I'm reading and hearing. And I think it has absolutely no connection to that infamous "Tuskegee Study" of 1932, the government-sponsored research in which 399 Black men who had syphilis, but were not informed, were recruited to study the effects of the disease. Very few people still breathing remember that abomination firsthand. 

However, these things are true. This just in: Nobody I know enjoys getting stuck with needles. As a diabetic I've injected myself virtually every day for 11 years; I'm still waiting to like it. Naysayers complain the vaccines were developed far too quickly, from too many different sources not to be suspect, while all the time Mr. "It's-No-Worse-Than-the-Flu-It-Will-Pass-Over-by-Spring" was patting himself on the back instead of protecting the nation. 

Who can we trust? Black folks demand. While we disparage, African Americans are three times more likely to die of coronavirus than Caucasians. Oh, my. 

My dear friend Karen Dumas, former chief communications officer for two Detroit mayors and one of the wisest people I know, called out of the blue as I was writing this to say hello. I casually asked if she had received her shots and to my great surprise, she said no. Nor does she intend to, Karen added, and she has rebuffed all efforts from friends and civic leaders to use her bully pulpit as a high-profile Black Motor Citizen to encourage others to roll up their sleeves.

Oh, so you're making a sociopolitical statement against the historic abuse and exploitation of African Americans as medical guinea pigs in this country, right? Once again, to my shock, she said no.

"It's because nobody knows what's in any of them," she explained. "I watched an interview with Dr. Fauci where he said everybody should get the vaccine, then at the end said it won't absolutely prevent you from getting COVID and may not prevent transmission of the virus. So what good does it serve?

The Moderna Missive.

"Two vaccines need two doses. Another needs only one. Two have to be kept at the North Pole, the other one you can store on your back porch. Can you mix the vaccines? What happens if you do? There's just too much going on too fast, so I'm staying away. I'm good."

Actually, I can't mount a convincing argument against any of those points –– except perhaps that we don't know what's in the flu or measles vaccines either, but the majority of us take those injections routinely without a second thought. 

And speaking of Detroit mayors, how about the current officeholder, one Mike Duggan, seemingly going out of his way to make my adopted hometown look foolish and cast himself as the village idiot? I have met Duggan on several occasions and I know he's smarter than to publicly declare he's refusing to allow the new one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine to cross the city limits. But that's what he said, because "Moderna and Pfizer are the best, and I am going to do everything I can to make sure the residents of the City of Detroit get the best."

Really? Really? Give me a break. Regions of our country are literally begging for additional vaccine doses and Duggan is turning them away? If he's truly serious about giving Detroiters the very best, how about making sure all the streetlights work at night? Mowing the vacant lots? Paving the potholes on Woodward Avenue? Sheesh.

Meanwhile, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, more than one in five Americans (22%) say they will get the vaccine only "if required for work, school, or other activities," or definitely will not get it at all. Hey, their lives, their choice. It is a free country, after all.

Here's how I look at it: The development of multiple COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year could be just as much a testament to modern scientific brilliance in the face of a potential disaster than some slapdash attempt to appease our government and a frightened public. To date, more than half a million Americans in the past 12 months said something to the effect of, "I'm not worried about this coronavirus crap; they're blowing it way out of proportion." Those people today are either six feet underground, scattered across some body of water or stacked in the back of a refrigerated semi. 

We've all got to die of something. I'm just determined that for me, it will not be this.

Besides, I've been entrusted with a precious gift, a donated kidney that has served me excellently for more than a decade. It's my responsibility to protect it with all methods at my disposal. True, we don't know what effect the vaccines will have longterm, but we know what COVID-19 is doing right now. And while we do have free will in this nation it is the UNITED States of America, contrary to what our politics have shown us lately. If most of the country takes the vaccine but a significant portion does not, we may be no farther ahead than if we had no vaccines at all.

Even though I'm now fully inoculated, I continue to wear a mask in public and adhere to social distancing, more for my fellow citizens than for myself. There is so much light at the end of our tunnel now, a return to normalcy is right around the corner. Take the shots. Wear the mask. Let's all cross the finish line together. Above ground. 

Goodbye, My Kidney Cousin

My dear friend Karen Dumas was the first to let me know. She and I had just shared breakfast that Friday morning, lamenting the post-New Year winter doldrums of January and the difficulty of getting your emotions jump-started and your life's goals in proper focus. So she must have known how I'd respond to the news.

She sent a text message that afternoon. Four words were all that was needed.

Gift of Life Organization

"Hugh Grannum has passed."

They hit me like four sledgehammer blows to the chest.

Hugh Parker Grannum, you see, besides being an award-winning, legendary, trailblazing photojournalist at the Detroit Free Press for more than 37 years prior to his retirement in 2007, felt to me like my kindred spirit because we shared an intimate connection:

We both contracted kidney failure at about the same time, and were on waiting lists for a transplant simultaneously, albeit in different states.

Hugh, 72, was at the Free Press long before I started writing for the rival Detroit News, and he remained there long after I left. We weren't exactly what you'd call bosom buddies during those years, but we knew of each other and were cordial whenever our paths would cross. (Bitter competition between the two daily papers in those days often hampered close friendships.)

But oh, how I admired his work! Hugh's photos consistently captured the essence of humanity, grace and quiet strength. As noted in his obituary, which you can read here, he was extremely mindful to shoot his subjects with dignity, especially African Americans, knowing it may be the only time in their lives they were photographed by a professional. I have worked with a number of very fine photographers over my career, but I always wished Hugh could have embellished one of my stories with his singular magic.

Hugh Grannum just radiated cool. The late, fabled Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, who generally despised anybody who even appeared to have a media connection, maintained an open-door policy with Hugh. Nattily dressed, thoroughly professional, devoted to his art, he was every inch a role model, and after his kidneys began heading south our mutual admiration deepened.

Because of the close timing of our end-stage renal diagnoses and the fact we were both creative black men who worked for Detroit newspapers, our illnesses became closely intertwined. We often were mentioned in the same sentence; the great Freep columnist Rochelle Riley wrote about our mutual transplant needs. I recall one "friendraiser" benefit in Detroit that was held on behalf of us both. Mutual friends would keep me aware of his condition, and I'm certain they did the same with Hugh.


He received his transplant first, in 2010. I sent him a congratulatory card and effusive online best wishes. When I got my Cheyenne in November 2011, I received the same in return. We began speaking on the phone semi-regularly, just checking in and offering encouragement. Then last winter, we finally coordinated my travel plans and his hectic post-retirement schedule in order to meet for dinner.

Hugh, his delightful wife Carolyn and I met at Slows, Detroit's hottest barbeque joint, on a snowy, windy night. He was wearing a jaunty winter cap (oh, he could wear some hats) and his stylish little round glasses. We talked and laughed for hours, comparing transplant waiting list stories, hospital tales, surgery sagas and medication inventories. It was a magical, cosmic kind of evening. It's not because he's gone now that I'm saying this, but it was a night I will never forget.

There was a lot more wrong with Hugh than kidney miseries. He was afflicted with leukemia and, like me, still waged a constant battle against hypertension. Yet he seemed so upbeat, so happy, so...healthy that night, so positive in looking forward to his future with Carolyn and his lovely daughter, Blake.

A lot of people say, "I can't believe he's gone," when someone close to them dies, but in this case I mean it. In a very real sense, losing Hugh is like losing a part of my body, a slice of my history. Admittedly, it's a stunning, slap-in-the-face reminder of my own fragility and mortality. Hugh was literally my brother under the skin, and we both had the scars to prove it.

I can't imagine ever forgetting you, my friend. Hugh Grannum and I will be forever joined at the renal artery. Godspeed to you, man, and deepest sympathies to your family and your many, many friends who will remember you long and fondly.

Again, for more about Hugh, here is the obituary from his newspaper home, the Detroit Free Press.