featured in NY Daily News | January 18, 2022
My brother died in 1994 of HIV/AIDS during what, for me, will always be the firstpandemic. Now, in 2021, I wait, hoping no one in my family will die in the second.
The day before my brother died, my mother and I made our daily pilgrimage to sit at his bedside. We found a hospital social worker perched in Mom’s usual seat, holding his hand and speaking softly to him, although he seemed unaware of her. She picked up a tiny pink sponge, and, holding it by its toothpicked end, dipped it in a pitcher of water and gently pressed it against his lips. At the sound of our footsteps, she turned and motioned for Mom to take her place. Still in her winter coat and gloves, Mom sat erect and held the metal base of the chair with both hands, bracing herself.
My brother, his breathing labored and erratic, was propped up in bed, his hospital gown slightly askew, falling off one shoulder. He appeared paper-thin and lifeless, like the paper dolls of my childhood when a torn tab sent their little dresses tilting to one side. Recognizing the distressed look on my face at the sight of him, the social worker explained, “It’s his breathing — the position makes it less difficult for him.” I pulled a chair next to his bed and took his hand, clammy and limp. I squeezed, but, unlike the day before, he did not squeeze back.
It’s impossible to miss the myriad similarities between the two pandemics: the early, complete governmental denial and neglect; the quack remedies; the scapegoating, stigmatization and politicization — so many lessons of the 1980s unheeded by the politicians and policymakers of 2020. On a personal level, there was our collective, sinking dread as we learned of the virus, followed by utter horror as people died all around us. And there was our incredulity. Surely, we thought, in this modern age, medical science would make a discovery, and doctors would save us all from dying.
Medical science is where the similarities end. In 2021, life-saving COVID-19 vaccines were made available to adults in record time, largely due to years of pioneering research into mRNA. According to the Centers for Disease Control, while the COVID-19 vaccine is not a guarantee of protection from infection, vaccinated and boosted individuals are less likely to develop serious illness and are far less likely to die. And although breakthrough infections from the omicron strain are more common than were breakthrough cases from earlier strains, vaccination and boosters, combined with mask-wearing and distancing in public, are still our best methods for keeping ourselves, our children and our neighbors safe.
The COVID-19 vaccine is a gift to humanity, a means to stem the tide of viral spread that would otherwise go unchecked. Yet despite evidence that plays out daily before our eyes — the unvaccinated dying in hospitals, begging for vaccine after it’s too late to save them — vaccine hesitancy is still rampant. Even more shocking, since the beginning of January 2022, pediatric cases have risen sharply, yet childhood vaccination rates remain abysmally low. Against the advice of their own pediatricians, an unfathomably high number of parents still refuse vaccinations for themselves and their kids, while the number of cases continue to skyrocket. Their refusal is personal: As four of my grandchildren head off to school and pre-school each day, mini masks affixed over their tiny, precious faces, I worry about the unvaccinated adults and children they will undoubtedly encounter.
The intransigence of vaccine-refusers is especially heartbreaking for those of us who waited and hoped and prayed for a vaccine to eradicate AIDS back in the 1980s and 1990s, a vaccine that never arrived. Instead, early treatments were ineffective and toxic, or, if they worked against one infection, another would surface. By 1996, when combination therapies finally became available to effectively treat HIV-infected patients — therapies that today allow thousands of people to live full and healthy lives — it was too late for my brother. He’d died two years earlier.
As I sat beside my brother, languishing in his hospital bed, I looked down at his hand in mine. I thought of the many times his hand had taken mine to guide or protect me — hundreds of times he’d walked me across the street to the playground, to the library, to school, to the ice cream stand. This hand that glided elegantly across the keys of his piano, that I awoke to, holding mine, after my car accident; that led as he taught me to jitterbug, and that tugged me into the subway just before the doors slammed shut. I stared down at it, noticing its delicacy: not much bigger than mine. Slender fingers interlaced with mine.
There is still no vaccine for HIV/AIDS.
Boulanger is currently writing a memoir.
